- Where
- Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
- Level
- Mid
As a Software Engineering Manager, you will join a substantial global engineering organisation and provide leadership to several highly skilled development teams following Agile methodologies to deliver market-leading insurance solutions. You will be passionate about the changes that AI are having in the industry and bring experience of leading existing teams helping them to make the most of the technologies.
Being a line manager, you will be responsible for the career development and wellbeing of engineers you work with, acting as a mentor, and ensuring they achieve their goals while continuing to develop their technical skills.
A sound technical background is essential to be successful in this role however this opportunity will also encompass many management dimensions such as project execution and stakeholder management, team engagement, recruitment and organisational design, continuous process and efficiency improvement.
The Role
As an Engineering Manager, you will:
• Ensure that all engineers make the most out of AI techniques and approaches.
• Be accountable for the development and release of identified software product families, to high-quality standards and, in the context of a wider evolutionary product planning process, to mutually agreed timescales and software requirements. This will require the application and evolution of appropriate agile processes and effective team coordination and communication.
• Act as a primary interface between the Product Management teams and the respective Engineering teams allocated to those products. You will proactively participate in the multi-disciplinary iterative product planning process for the identified product families to assist Product Leaders converge on development priorities and achievable product roadmaps. You will Inject ideas, constraints, and awareness of opportunities into the product planning process.
• Work with Architects and Senior Engineers to assess technology options against technical and non-technical criteria, and to define robust and scalable architectures supporting the evolution of existing products and the creation of new innovative solutions.
• Provide project troubleshooting support, lending technical, process and people skills (of self or an available colleague) to a team where appropriate to unblock project issues and recommend actions which will reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
• Oversee the adequate provision of final-line technical support (e.g. for customer reports of potential software defects that are escalated to the engineering teams) for identified software products.
• Support and facilitate early adopter trials of new software capabilities, involving either internal users or external customers.
• Be responsible (directly or by delegation) for the provision of adequate periodic reporting of progress, risks, opportunities and next steps for each identified project (which may include “non-product” projects such as R&D and recruitment).
• Be responsible for the recruitment, development and retention of high-calibre software engineers, architects and team managers, through working with recruitment agencies, mentoring (directly and by delegation), identification and organisation of training, conducting career development reviews and recommending, from time to time, evolution of team structures.
• Provide oversight and monitoring of the development, quality assurance and governance processes around identified projects, considering and recommending improvements to these processes and the tools which support them. You will facilitate a culture of cost-effective continuous improvement and lead initiatives to optimise efficiency and accelerate project execution.
• Encourage and engage in collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and software components with other Willis Towers Watson development centres.
What you’ll bring
The essential skills/experience for this position are:
• Significant experience leading teams of 10+ engineers/architects/test…