United Kingdom
Arqiva
Citation Group
Engineering Manager
United Kingdom
Wilmslow, England, United Kingdom
JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaReactAWSDockerKubernetesPHPTerraform
About the opportunity
Engineering Manager
Location: Hybrid – Remote - With quarterly travel to Wilmslow HQ
Salary: Competitive
We are The Citation Group - a collective of businesses dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized enterprises across a range of essential services. We know that running a business means juggling a lot. Our mission is to ease these pressures by providing expertise, guidance, and solutions that enable business leaders to focus on what they do best. From HR and Health & Safety to Cybersecurity, E-Learning, and ISO compliance, we’ve got you covered.
Citation has achieved strong growth through a combination of organic expansion and strategic acquisitions, continually broadening our expertise, services, and reach to create a one-stop shop that supports businesses across the UK, Canada and Australia.
The Role
- Lead multiple engineering teams to deliver secure, reliable, high-quality products at pace.
- You will drive modern engineering practices, DevOps maturity and AI-enabled ways of working across both our products and software delivery processes.
- Working closely with Product, Design, Architects and Tech Leads, you will help shape technical direction, improve delivery effectiveness, and coach teams to build, ship and operate software successfully.
People Leadership
- Lead, coach, and support multiple cross-functional engineering teams and tech leads.
- Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Run regular 1:1s, provide clear feedback and support career development and performance management.
- Grow leadership capability within teams so decisions can be made effectively at the right level.
- Support hiring, onboarding and retention to build diverse, high-performing teams.
Technical Leadership and Engineering Excellence
- Provide technical leadership without becoming a bottleneck, enabling strong engineering decisions across teams.
- Champion modern engineering practices including:
- TDD/BDD, Clean Code, pair, and mob programming
- Automated testing across unit, integration, end-to-end and performance levels
- Secure SDLC practices from design through deployment
- Work with architects and senior engineers to evolve robust, observable, secure and cost-effective cloud-native architectures.
- Maintain a strong understanding of technologies including:
- .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP, and related frameworks
- JavaScript/TypeScript, React and modern front-end development
- Relational and NoSQL databases
AI, Automation and Innovation
- Drive adoption of AI and automation within engineering workflows and product capabilities.
- Identify opportunities where AI can improve quality, reduce manual effort or enable new customer value.
- Lead effective adoption of AI/agentic coding assistants across coding, testing, documentation and operational workflows.
- Ensure AI usage aligns with security, privacy and compliance standards.
- Run lightweight experiments and spikes to validate AI use cases and measure impact.
- Collaborate with internal or external AI/ML specialists and vendors to integrate AI services into products and platforms.
- Support the full lifecycle of AI-enabled features from prototype through to production monitoring and operation.
Delivery and Stakeholder Management
- Partner with Product Managers and Product Owners to define outcomes, priorities, roadmaps and delivery plans.
- Ensure teams deliver small, frequent, high-quality increments and manage dependencies proactively.
- Communicate clearly with stakeholders on priorities, risks, trade-offs and delivery scope.
- Contribute to cross-team planning, portfolio alignment, and architectural review activities.
Process, Quality and Continuous Improvement
- Continuously improve team ways of working, agile delivery practices and operational processes.
- Establish clear standards for testing, release management, resilience and non-functional requirements.
- Use metrics and team feedback to improve delivery flow, reliability, stability and team health.
- Improve cross-team coordination around technical debt, releases, environments and operational change.
About you
- We are looking for someone with strong hands-on experience using and scaling AI in engineering environments, particularly AI/agentic coding assistants, and AI-enabled product capabilities.
Leadership and Management
- Significant experience leading software engineering teams delivering production systems.
- Experience managing multiple teams or complex product-focused engineering organisations.
- Proven ability to develop engineers and tech leads, manage performance effectively and improve team health.
Technical
- Strong background in modern software engineering, including experience with:
- .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP and related frameworks
- JavaScript/TypeScript, React and modern front-end technologies
- Relational and/or NoSQL databases
- Practical experience with:
- CI/CD pipelines and automated testing
- Cloud platforms such as Azure and/or AWS
- Containers and infrastructure-as-code tools including Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform or Ansible
- Monitoring, logging and performance analysis tooling
AI and Automation
- Practical experience using and rolling out AI/agentic coding assistants in engineering teams.
- Experience designing, integrating or operating AI-enabled product features.
- Ability to evaluate AI tools and approaches pragmatically across value, risk, cost and compliance considerations.
Behavioural
- Excellent communication skills across technical and business audiences.
- Strong problem-solving and decision-making capability in complex environments.
- Collaborative, low-ego approach with strong cross-functional partnership skills.
- Strong ownership mindset with a focus on delivering measurable outcomes.
Nice to Have
- Experience in B2B SaaS and/or domains relevant to Citation including HR, Health & Safety, Certification, background screening or eLearning.
- Experience working across multiple business units or product portfolios.
- Experience leading distributed or remote teams.
- Previous exposure to ML/AI-focused engineering leadership environments.
Here’s a taste of the perks we roll out for our extraordinary team members:
- 25 Days of Holiday + 8 Bank Holidays: We’re talking sun-soaked beaches, snow-capped mountains, or simply your favourite cozy spot at home. Take your well-deserved break with 25 days of holiday, plus those cherished bank holidays.
- Birthday Bliss: Your birthday isn’t just another day on the calendar; it’s YOUR day! Enjoy it in style with a day off, because at Citation, we believe in celebrating YOU.
- Post-Wedding Bliss: Newlyweds, we’ve got something special for you too! Extra weeks of holiday to bask in the glow of post-wedding happiness.
- Growing Families: We’re all about supporting our Citation family, and that includes expectant parents. Vouchers and special perks await to celebrate the newest addition to your family.
- Healthcare cash plan: Your well-being is our priority. That’s why we offer private healthcare to ensure your peace of mind and keep you feeling your best.
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