The Openwork Partnership
Senior Engineering Manager
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Tribe Lead
The Tribe Lead is the senior technical authority within their tribe. You own the quality of what the tribe builds, the technical direction it takes, and the capability of the engineers and quality engineers who build it. You are a practising engineer as well as a leader — credible in a design review, active in code review, and present in the detail of what your team ships.
Openwork operates a tribe model across its technology function. Each tribe has a clear mandate — whether that is decommissioning legacy, building new platform capability, or something else entirely — and the Tribe Lead is accountable for the engineering quality of everything that tribe delivers. The role is deliberately generic: the same standard of technical leadership is expected regardless of which tribe you are assigned to, and this job description applies equally to Clean Slate, New Ground, and any tribe Openwork stands up in the future.
You will set the technical roadmap for your tribe, own quality end-to-end, line manage the engineers in your team, and act as the primary technical voice between your tribe and the broader engineering function. You will uphold the architectural standards set by the Architects, apply the engineering standards set by the Head of Engineering, and challenge both when the evidence warrants it. This is a senior role. You will be expected to operate without close supervision, make sound technical decisions under ambiguity, and develop the engineers around you as deliberately as you develop the codebase.
This is a hybrid role, based 3 days a week from the Swindon office.
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The Benefits
- Salary - up to £90,000
- Bonus scheme - on target bonus - 15%
- Pension scheme - contribute up to 5% of your salary and Openwork will match you and put in an extra 5%
- Critical illness cover
- Income protection
- Death in service - 4x salary
- 27 days holiday + bank holidays, with the opportunity to buy up to an additional 10 days
- A range of other flexible benefits to include private medical insurance, dental insurance and much more.
Key Accountabilities
- Set and own the tribe’s technical roadmap, architecture and technology direction.
- Drive engineering quality through testing, CI/CD, code reviews and observability.
- Remain hands-on with design, coding, reviews and technical leadership.
- Line manage engineers, supporting performance, development and hiring.
- Translate architectural standards into practical delivery decisions.
- Represent the tribe in architecture reviews and engineering forums.
- Identify, manage and escalate technical risks where appropriate.
- Champion AI-assisted engineering practices and tooling.
- Ensure technical documentation is accurate, current and useful.
- Lead technical onboarding and support new engineers joining the team.
What Will You Need to Succeed?
- Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience.
- Proven people leadership, including coaching, performance management and hiring.
- Deep expertise in.NET, C#, Azure and cloud-native development.
- Strong experience with API design, integration patterns and modern architectures.
- Ownership of engineering quality, testing, CI/CD and release management.
- Strong understanding of security, GDPR, FCA requirements and regulated environments.
- Ability to translate technical concepts and risks into clear business language.
- Experience driving continuous improvement, technical roadmaps and AI-enabled engineering practices.
- Knowledge of microservices, event-driven architecture and enterprise integration.
- Financial services and large-scale transformation experience preferred.
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Why Us?
At The Openwork Partnership, we're a dynamic, fast-paced, and growing business with huge ambition. This is all made possible by the brilliant people who are part of The Openwork Partnership family. We're investing heavily in our colleagues, continuously striving to give them the platform to develop personally and professionally and reach their full potential. We’re also very proud of our culture, as one of the Best 100 Large Companies to work for in 2022.
The Openwork Partnership values, and respects individuality and we are committed to building an inclusive culture and environment which truly recognises and celebrates our colleague’s individual differences and identities – just like our financial advice, for us, it’s personal. We believe everyone can make a difference and your race, religion, disability, and gender will never be a barrier. At Openwork, we have a strong ethic of care for each other where you can balance a successful career with your commitments and interests outside of work. We believe that you will bring your best self to work if you are trusted to choose when, where and how you do it.
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