Civica
Senior Engineering Manager
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Civica builds software that runs essential public services. Our systems support local government, the NHS, housing associations, and financial institutions: services that millions of people depend on every day. When our software works well, caseworkers make better decisions, clinicians access the right information, and councils deliver services that communities rely on.
We're not a startup chasing the next hype cycle. We're a company with deep roots in the public sector, working on problems that matter, and we're investing seriously in how we build software to make sure we can keep doing that for the next decade.
Why we feel you'll like the role of Senior Engineering Manager
You'll lead a domain of 6-10 teams (roughly 60-90 engineers), manage the Engineering Managers who run those teams day to day, and report to the Director of Engineering. It's a manager-of-managers role, working alongside Product and commercial leadership as a peer, not just a bigger single team and not a purely internal-facing management job.
It's a step up from an Engineering Manager role, not a bigger version of one. An EM owns a team. A Senior EM owns the system of teams: how they're structured, how work flows between them, how the EMs leading them grow, and how the domain shows up to Product and the wider business. You'll spend less time in any one team's backlog and more time on the conditions that let several teams deliver well at once: resourcing, coaching, architectural alignment, and representing engineering credibly outside engineering.
The domain has real history and real constraints, not a green field: a mix of established and modernising systems, some legacy platforms alongside newer stacks, and teams at different levels of technical and operational maturity. You'll be expected to form your own view of what's working, what isn't, and what needs to change, and to build the trust needed to act on it.
You'll make decisions based on data, and help build a culture of measurement and continuous improvement.
What you'll be accountable for:
Teams & people
- Coaching and developing the Engineering Managers (and senior/lead engineers) who report to you: their technical judgement, their people leadership, their career growth.
- Structuring and re-structuring teams as the work demands it, closing skill or capacity gaps and avoiding key-person dependencies rather than treating team shape as fixed
- Holding a consistent, visible bar for what a high-performing team looks like across your domain, and addressing sustained under-performance directly rather than leaving it to individual EMs
- Building a hiring and retention engine for the domain: enabling your EMs to hire well, and finding growth and mobility paths for strong engineers.
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Delivery
- Being the first line of escalation for delivery and technical issues across your teams, arriving with context and a proposed path forward rather than just the problem
- Coordinating effort across workstreams and delegating decisions to EMs with clear boundaries, then following through rather than disappearing after handoff
- Partnering with Product and commercial stakeholders to define shared metrics, challenge scope and trade-offs, and keep teams aligned to a durable mission rather than reactive requests
- Applying team-topology thinking (Conway's Law and similar) to keep team boundaries and interaction patterns deliberate rather than accidental
Technical craft
- Staying close enough to the technical detail to ask good questions and spot drift, without being hands-on: your leverage is through your EMs and senior engineers, not your own commits
- Protecting space for quality against deadline pressure, and coaching your EMs to do the same with their teams.
- Driving the domain's operational maturity (testing, observability, incident response) in partnership with teams rather than mandating from above.
- Building credible cases for structural or technical investment (replatforming, team re-formation, headcount) grounded in business need.
Leadership
- Representing your domain to peers, Product, commercial stakeholders, and senior leadership, and representing the wider engineering organisation's priorities back into your domain
- Operating as a genuine partner to senior stakeholders outside engineering, not just an escalation point they go through
- Challenging the status quo constructively, including with more senior colleagues, and forming clear, evidence-based views you're willing to be challenged on
- Connecting your teams' technical work to user and business outcomes
Requirements
- A track record of managing managers: you've led other Engineering Managers or equivalent senior technical leads, not just individual engineers, across a multi-team domain of comparable scale
- Strong technical grounding: not hands-on day to day, but deep enough to hold a real technical conversation, sense-check architectural direction, and know when to step in, across a mix of legacy and modern systems
- Evidence-based leadership: you use delivery and quality data to make decisions and build buy-in, including constructive challenge upward when the evidence supports it
- Genuine partnership with Product and commercial stakeholders: you can speak fluently about business and user outcomes, not just engineering output, and operate credibly as a peer to non-engineering senior stakeholders
- A coaching orientation: you develop people through delegation and follow-through, not by doing their job for them
- Comfortable with ambiguity: you create clarity for your teams even where the domain itself is still being shaped
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Nice to have
- Experience in public sector, health, housing, or regulated environments
- Experience leading through team re-structuring or organisational change
- Exposure to legacy modernisation alongside greenfield delivery within the same portfolio
- Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering practices and how they change what "good" looks like for a team
- Awareness of Developer Experience principles
- Worked in an environment where engineers own production services
- Experience working with globally distributed teams
Benefits
Why You'll Love Working with Us
As a company, we're passionate about what we do and the citizens we serve. If you, too, want to champion the use of technology in public services to improve outcomes for citizens and public sector organizations, then Civica is the right place for you. We will help you unlock the best version of yourself, achieve career growth, and make a real difference to people and communities.
We know that when our people are happy, they work better and have greater job satisfaction. Here's what you can expect:
Time Off & Work-Life Balance
- 25 Days Annual Leave + bank holidays - plus the option to buy up to 10 extra days!
- Days of Difference - Up to 3 extra days off for volunteering.
Financial Well-being & Security
- Pension Contributions - 5% employer match to support your future.
- Income Protection - Up to 75% salary cover for long-term illness.
- Life Assurance - 4x salary tax-free lump sum.
- Critical Illness Cover - £25,000 lump sum (extendable to dependents).
Health & Perks
- Private Medical Insurance - Fast access to private healthcare.
- Health Cash Plan - Claim back physio, therapies & more.
- Dental Insurance - Cover for routine & emergency care.
- Affinity Groups - Join employee-led communities.
- Bounty Bonus - Refer a friend & get rewarded.
At Civica, we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We believe that a variety of perspectives drives innovation and excellence, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other legally protected characteristic. Our recruitment process is designed to ensure fairness and transparency, so every candidate has an equal chance to contribute to our mission.
If you need any adjustments or accommodations to participate in our recruitment process, please let us know. We are here to support you.
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