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AI Summary
Hands-On Engineering Manager
Wilmslow / Remote (UK) | Reports to Head of Engineering | Single product engineering squad
Role Purpose
As a Hands-On Engineering Manager at The Citation Group, you will own both the people and the technical direction of a product engineering squad. You lead the team, manage and grow the engineers in it, and set the technical bar, and you do the last of these by staying close to the code rather than from the sidelines.
You are expected to:
Own the technical direction and architecture for your product area, and stay hands-on in the code where it has the most leverage: spikes, prototypes, thorny problems, reviews and setting the standard by example.
Lead, coach and line-manage the engineers in your squad, growing capability so more decisions are made at the right level with less dependence on you.
Embed modern engineering, security and DevOps practices, and drive agentic ways of working in how the team builds software and, where it fits, in the products you ship.
Partner with Product and Design on outcomes, and give stakeholders honest, clear communication on progress, risk and trade-offs.
A note on balance: you stay hands-on to keep technical credibility and to unblock the team, not to sit on the critical path. As the squad grows, expect your share of hands-on coding to reduce and your leverage through others to increase.
We expect strong, recent experience designing and running agentic workflows in a real engineering environment, and leading from the front in how these ways of working are adopted and scaled.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership and Architecture
Own the technical direction and architectural decisions for your product area.
Stay hands-on: design and build the highest-leverage work yourself (spikes, proofs-of-concept, complex or risky features, key reviews) without becoming the bottleneck on committed delivery.
Lead technical discussions and design sessions, and make the call when the team is stuck.
Balance technical excellence with delivery pragmatism: know when to accrue technical debt and when to pay it down.
Collaborate with architects and other leads on cross-cutting decisions, evolving systems toward robust, observable, secure and cost-effective architectures (including appropriate use of microservices, event-driven designs and cloud-native services).
Engineering Excellence and Quality
Set the engineering standard by example and embed it across the squad: clean, testable, secure code that others want to emulate.
Drive TDD/BDD, secure SDLC and automated testing at all levels (unit, integration, end-to-end, performance) through demonstration and pairing, not just advocacy.
Own code review culture: constructive, educational feedback that raises the bar.
Build observability in (instrumentation, logging, monitoring, alerting) and keep CI/CD pipelines fast and reliable.
Manage technical debt proactively at both code and system level.
Use quantitative metrics (DORA, cycle time, MTTR, deployment frequency) alongside qualitative feedback (retros, team health) to improve flow, reliability and sustainability, grounded in real knowledge of the codebase.
People Leadership and Team Health
Line-manage the engineers in your squad: run regular 1:1s and growth conversations, set clear expectations, give timely feedback, and support performance and career development.
Mentor through doing: pairing, mob sessions and live code reviews that grow design, testing and system-thinking capability.
Grow leadership in the team (senior engineers, tech leads) so you make yourself progressively less needed.
Foster psychological safety, ownership and a safe environment for technical experimentation and learning from failure.
Contribute to hiring, technical interviews, onboarding and retention, building a diverse, high-performing squad.
AI and Agentic Workflows
Run agentic workflows in your own work: define the outcome and guardrails, direct agents through multi-step tasks (implementation, tests, documentation, debugging, review), and stay the human who verifies and approves what ships.
Demonstrate effective agentic workflows to the team through real examples, and grow their ability to decompose work into tasks an agent can execute reliably.
Own the agentic agenda for your product area: identify where agents can take on multi-step delivery or remove toil, improve quality or enable new capabilities, and prioritise those opportunities with Product.
Design guard-railed, auditable workflows where agents plan and execute and humans review, approve and improve, aligned with security, privacy and compliance standards.
Run lightweight spikes to validate agentic use cases, measure impact (speed, quality, reliability, outcomes) and decide what to scale, iterate or stop.
Ensure code and changes produced through agentic workflows meet the security and quality bar before they ship.
Delivery and Stakeholder Management
Partner with Product Managers and Owners to turn strategy into clear outcomes, realistic roadmaps and plans that reflect true capacity and constraints.
Ensure the squad delivers small, frequent, high-quality increments rather than large, risky drops, and surfaces dependencies and technical risks early.
Provide realistic technical estimates and clear, honest communication to stakeholders on priorities, trade-offs, progress, risks and what is in and out of scope for a given period.
Lead and take part in agile ceremonies and cross-team planning (planning, refinement, stand-ups, reviews, retros, and quarterly or portfolio forums), keeping the squad's plans aligned with wider Citation priorities.
Required Experience and Skills
Leadership and management
Experience leading or managing software engineering teams delivering production systems, with a track record of developing engineers and tech leads and handling performance fairly.
A demonstrated ability to lead people while remaining technically hands-on, rather than stepping fully back from the code.
Technical
Significant senior engineering experience with technical leadership on complex systems, and deep expertise in at least one backend stack with the ability to work across languages and frameworks.
Strong full-stack capability across the ecosystem: .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP and associated frameworks (e.g. MVC, Spring, Hibernate); JavaScript/TypeScript, ES6+ and component-based front-end libraries such as React, plus HTML/CSS; relational and/or NoSQL databases.
Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure-as-code; cloud platforms (Azure and/or AWS) and containers (Docker/Kubernetes); monitoring, logging and performance analysis.
Strong security fundamentals (OWASP, secure coding, threat modelling, security testing) and experience designing scalable architectures and evolving legacy systems.
AI and automation
Hands-on experience designing and running agentic workflows (e.g. with Claude Code and Devin) with demonstrable gains in delivery speed and quality, and experience teaching others to work this way.
Experience rolling out agentic ways of working across real teams and/or designing, integrating or operating AI-enabled product features, with the judgement to evaluate value, risk, cost and compliance critically.
Behavioural
Technical credibility: engineers respect your judgment and look to you for direction.
Excellent communication: comfortable moving between deep technical discussion and senior business conversations.
Pragmatic decision-making in ambiguity, with high follow-through to real results.
Collaborative, low-ego style, with a strong ownership mentality for both technical outcomes and team success.
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