We are looking for a dynamic and empathetic leader with deep technical expertise, strong leadership skills, and the ability to navigate the complexities of a large, evolving organisation. The ideal candidate will bring a thoughtful and collaborative approach to balancing competing priorities and driving impactful change within a complex environment like the NHS. As Lead Engineer, you will be instrumental in designing and building the greenfield National Screening Platform, modernising legacy systems, and ensuring the delivery of secure, scalable, and high-quality services. In addition to your technical contributions, you will play a key role in fostering psychological safety and cultivating a culture of trust, collaboration, and shared purpose, enabling teams to thrive and deliver solutions that directly improve patient care and support broader NHS objectives.

1. Engineering Design and Technical Delivery:

• Designing and delivering highly available, distributed national screening systems with stringent resilience and availability requirements (e.g., 99.9% or higher).
• Developing scalable, secure, and compliant solutions to manage large data volumes and sensitive patient records effectively.
• Balancing architectural trade-offs to optimise system efficiency, scalability, and maintainability.
• Making engineering decisions aligned with the NHSE Tech Radar, the Engineering Framework, and guidance from the Engineering Technical Authority (ETA) and Engineering Board.
• Leveraging Cloud-native patterns, microservices architectures, and serverless technologies where appropriate to maximise agility and reliability.

2. Technical Leadership:

• Acting as a technical lead for squads and products, ensuring delivery of critical functionalities with a focus on value-driven, iterative delivery.
• Driving a culture of DevOps (defined by NHSE as an approach to delivering quality outcome to end users promptly and safely) by embedding security, quality, and automation throughout the engineering lifecycle.
• Fostering collaborative cross-functional teams, promoting shared ownership, and enabling team members to excel.
• Regularly seeking user feedback to validate assumptions, refine solutions, and align products with user needs and measurable outcomes.
• Adopting modern practices such as Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and SRE principles to improve reliability and scalability as guided by the NHSE Engineering Framework.

3. System Development:

• Overseeing end-to-end development environments, including infrastructure, pipelines, testing (test automation is at the core of our expectations), and operational tools, ensuring seamless integration and high-quality outputs.
• Defining and delivering User Stories and acceptance criteria, ensuring outcomes meet agreed quality, security, and functionality standards.
• Promoting a test-first approach (e.g., Test-Driven Development or Behaviour-Driven Development) to ensure quality and maintainability.
• Driving the adoption of test automation and leveraging modern testing frameworks to enable continuous validation.
• Embedding the principle that testing and quality assurance are team-wide (the Outcome Team) responsibilities, fostering a proactive and collaborative approach to delivering robust systems.

4. Governance:

• Managing technical assurance processes for solutions along with the Product and Delivery lead counterparts to ensure compliance with NHS England standards by delivering incremental value proven by test automation and user feedback – with the objective of deploying to production at least once a day.
• Reviewing documentation produced by the team and work with the team on actively maintaining ADRs (decision records), considering options, identifying risks, and implementing effective mitigations.
• Collaborating with Product and Delivery colleagues to actively manage technical debt, ensuring sustainability and maintainability of the service.
• Ensuring systems meet NHS England's standards for security, interoperability, and regulatory compliance.

Knowledge Requirements:

1. Essential:

• Expertise in software architecture and development, including technologies like Python, TypeScript, Playwright, Locust, Terraform, Azure, and AWS.
• Understanding of web services, distributed computing, and database technologies (e.g., SQL and NoSQL).
• Knowledge of modern software quality practices, including CI/CD pipelines, static analysis, and dynamic security testing.
• Familiarity with modern observability practices (e.g., logging, monitoring, tracing).

2. Desirable:

• Familiarity with NHS and healthcare technologies, including interoperability standards (e.g., HL7, FHIR).
• Understanding of big data technologies and cloud-native architectures.
• Knowledge of SRE principles and operational best practices.

Skills and Experience:

• Defining functional and non-functional requirements and challenging ambiguities to refine them.
• Building robust, resilient, and highly available system architectures using Cloud and distributed computing principles.

Effectively managing stakeholder communications and facilitating complex business changes.