The Citation Group
Technical Lead
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Technical Lead
Location: Remote (must live within commuting distance of Exeter)
Salary: Competitive
We are Ucheck - we are not just a background check provider; we are an engine of trust, safety, and compliance for UK businesses. We empower organisations to hire safely, quickly, and legally by verifying the credentials and histories of potential employees.
Ucheck is part of 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
uCheck is looking for an experienced Technical Lead to inspire, develop and lead its software engineering team.
Team Leadership
- Lead, coach and develop the uCheck engineering team, creating a positive, collaborative and high performing culture.
- Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback and support career development.
- Foster psychological safety, encourage knowledge sharing and reduce key person dependencies.
- Support recruitment, onboarding, succession planning and team capability.
Technical Leadership
- Define the technical direction of the uCheck platform, balancing business needs with security, scalability, resilience and long term maintainability.
- Remain hands on where needed through code reviews, pairing, technical guidance and solution design.
- Work with architects and technical leaders across Citation Group to drive engineering best practice.
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Engineering Excellence
- Champion high standards of code quality, testing, security and documentation.
- Drive continuous improvement, ensuring technical debt, platform health and engineering quality are prioritised alongside product delivery.
- Promote secure, maintainable and well tested software development practices.
AI First Engineering
- Lead the adoption of AI assisted and agentic engineering tools, embedding them into day to day development.
- Coach the team on the effective, responsible and secure use of AI to improve productivity, quality and delivery.
- Encourage innovation while establishing clear standards and governance for AI assisted development.
Delivery & Platform Ownership
- Work closely with Product, QA and the Verification Software Development Manager to deliver high quality software predictably and efficiently.
- Improve planning, estimation and delivery discipline while balancing new features with maintenance, security and technical debt.
- Support platform reliability, observability, CI/CD, operational resilience and continuous improvement.
Stakeholder Management
- Build strong relationships with Product, QA, Infrastructure, Security and stakeholders across Citation Group.
- Communicate technical decisions, risks and priorities clearly to both technical and non technical audiences.
- Represent the engineering team and contribute to cross functional and Group wide initiatives.
Required Experience and Skills
Essential
- Previous experience as a Technical Lead, Engineering Lead, Development Lead or Engineering Manager within a software-development environment.
- Demonstrable experience of line-managing and developing software engineers.
- Strong experience of leading teams through delivery, technical and interpersonal challenges.
- Strong commercial experience with PHP.
- Experience working with MySQL or a comparable relational database platform.
- Experience delivering and operating software on AWS.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, system design and integration patterns.
- Experience with Agile software delivery and iterative product development.
- Experience establishing or improving engineering standards and working practices.
- Experience with code review, automated testing and secure software development.
- Experience balancing feature development with technical debt, maintenance and platform health.
- Experience working directly with Product Owners and business stakeholders.
- Experience communicating technical risks and trade-offs to non-technical audiences.
- Experience managing production systems and supporting operational improvement.
- Daily or regular use of AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) with demonstrable productivity gains.
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Perks
- 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 one week 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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