Lead Software Engineer job description

Software engineering — Lead
Sets technical direction across teams and unblocks their work.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Software Development
- Programming and Build — You can deliver changes of high technical complexity across several components, and you set the programming conventions your team follows. You review others for design as well as correctness, and you are who people ask when a build or a risky change goes wrong.
- Modern Development Standards — You can apply modern development standards to complex multi-team work and lead others in adopting them. When you make a deliberate exception you write down the tradeoff you accepted.
- Code Review — You can review high-risk changes such as data migrations, security-relevant code and cross-team interfaces, and you set what the review bar is for your team. You coach reviewers whose feedback is vague or discouraging.
- Debugging and Diagnosis — You can lead diagnosis of intermittent and production-only failures that have already defeated others, and you decide when to stop investigating and mitigate instead. You then improve the tooling that made it hard.
- Refactoring — You can plan and land a structural change across several components, keeping it reversible and visible to the teams affected. You argue for the work in terms of delivery cost rather than taste.
- Version Control — You can define the branching and release workflow your team uses and explain the tradeoffs it makes. You handle the situations others avoid, such as a rewritten shared branch or a secret committed to history.
- API Design — You can design interfaces used across team boundaries, negotiate them with their consumers, and set your team conventions and deprecation policy. You can judge when a breaking change is worth its migration cost.

Testing and Quality
- Test Design — You can shape the test approach for a whole product, influencing technique choice across teams so risk is mitigated as early as possible. You coach others and prune tests that no longer earn their runtime.
- Test Automation — You can set the automation strategy for a product, deciding what runs where, on what trigger, and what blocks a release, and you evaluate tooling against real needs rather than novelty.
- Defect Management — You can lead improvement of defect and test processes, help others assess complex or contested defects, and use defect patterns to make specific recommendations about where to invest. You coach others in doing the same.
- Test Strategy — You can create and manage test strategies across several delivery streams and lead teams in adopting them. You argue for quality effort in terms of risk avoided rather than activity performed.
- Performance Testing — You can set the performance targets a product is built against and lead work across teams to meet them under real traffic shapes. You can tell a genuine regression from environment noise and act accordingly.
- Accessibility Testing — You can set the accessibility bar for a product and the checks that enforce it, champion it with internal stakeholders, and judge which findings are genuine barriers rather than tool noise.

Systems and Design
- Systems Design — You can design systems spanning several components and teams where the requirements are still contested, and you set the design approach others follow. You size the design to the need rather than to the most interesting version of it.
- Systems Integration — You can lead integration across systems owned by different teams or suppliers, negotiating both the contract and the cutover plan. You surface the assumptions each side has made about the other before they cause an outage.
- Architectural Decisions — You can take decisions that bind several teams under real uncertainty, and you make the tradeoff visible instead of presenting the outcome as obvious. You reopen a decision when the evidence changes and say publicly that you have.
- Schema and Query Design — You can design the data model for a whole service, including how it will evolve, and you set the schema conventions your team works to. You correct the query patterns that will not scale before the data volume proves it.
- Prototyping and Spikes — You can use prototypes to take risk out of complex work, and you set how far a spike runs before the team commits to a direction. You are willing to report that the prototype disproved the option you preferred.

Operations and SRE
- Continuous Delivery — You can design the delivery approach for a product, including how changes are gated, released progressively and rolled back, and you shorten the time from commit to production. You remove a manual approval by replacing it with a check, not by dropping it.
- Observability and Monitoring — You can set the observability approach for a product, retire the alerts that wake people for nothing, and make sure a new service ships instrumented instead of gaining it after an incident. You use the data to argue for engineering work.
- Production Incident Response — You can lead a severe or unclear incident across several teams and keep the investigation ordered when there is pressure to start guessing. You decide when a partial mitigation is enough, and you run reviews that produce change rather than blame.
- Availability and Capacity — You can agree availability targets with the business and design a product that holds them, weighing redundancy against cost honestly. You plan for the demand events others treat as unlikely, and you test that the plan works.
- Infrastructure as Code — You can design the infrastructure codebase for a product, set the patterns other teams reuse and bring manually built resources back under code. You keep a risky change reviewable by making the plan small enough to read.

Security and Data
- Application Security — You can threat model a system with the team, set the security bar for the product and make sure high-risk changes get a real review. You can tell a genuine risk from tool noise and explain which one you are looking at.
- Secure Data Handling — You can set how a product handles sensitive data, work with legal and privacy colleagues on the obligations, and build controls that make compliance provable rather than asserted. You find the data flow nobody wrote down.
- Dependency Management — You can set how a product takes on and retires dependencies, plan an upgrade that touches many services and handle a supply-chain advisory quickly and calmly. You get a stuck legacy dependency moving rather than recording it as permanent.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run work spanning several teams, negotiate scope and sequencing with their owners, and maintain one shared plan that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work spanning several teams, name the assumptions each figure rests on, and re-cut the plan as those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement demonstrably improves the projects you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.