Engineering Manager

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to join the Retail Technology Team. The team focuses on the development and enhancement of our retail platform supporting our extensive network of shops and self-service betting terminals. The team will be small multi-skilled and highly focused employing multiple technology stacks and providing a business capability function.

• Expertise in coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers, Tech Leads, and QAs, fostering a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, accountability, and technical excellence.
• Experience of unblocking teams, facilitating effective collaboration, and enabling engineers and QAs to perform at their best.
• Experience of guiding career development, supporting growth, and promoting a culture of continuous improvement across one or more teams.
• Expertise in growing individuals to meet their potential and fulfil their capabilities.
• Expertise in having clear and honest conversations with people around their skills, aspirations and performance, being accountable for observing, acting on, and following up on any actions to grow or correct.
• Experience of building an environment where technical and personal experimentation can take place within clear boundaries and expectations.
• Experience of fostering sustainable ways of working, balancing delivery pressure with long-term team health and retention.
• Experience of driving cross-team communication and alignment on shared goals, approaches, standards, and quality expectations across the product domain.
• Experience of managing stakeholder relationships, using delivery insights, risks, and data (including quality and reliability signals) to ensure priorities and challenges are understood and supported.
• Accountability for ensuring quality is built into all delivery processes, with every team owning quality outcomes through strong collaboration between engineers and QAs, rather than relying on testing as a final gate.
• Expertise in providing high-level technical direction and strategic guidance for a team or multiple teams, ensuring alignment with business goals and the target architecture.
• Expertise in promoting best practices in system design, architecture patterns, and technical standards, with quality, reliability, and testability considered by default.
• Expertise in reviewing technical plans and guiding design decisions, partnering with Tech Leads to enable effective and sustainable implementation.
• Expertise in ensuring teams adopt strong engineering practices, including test automation, CI/CD, observability, performance monitoring, and security and compliance standards.
• Expertise in leveraging observability signals (metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs) to understand system health, identify quality risks early, and inform prioritisation.
• Expertise in understanding data storage, caching, database design, and service interfaces, providing high-level guidance rather than hands-on implementation.
• Experience of using performance, scaling, reliability, and availability metrics to inform technical trade-offs, delivery priorities, and investment decisions.
• Experience in cloud cost management and optimisation across public or private cloud platforms.
• Expertise in balancing long term sustainability whist delivering for today
• Experience of ensuring QA is embedded into ways of working, including planning, design, development, release, and post-production learning, so quality is continuously validated rather than inspected late.
• Experience of coordinating and clarifying requirements with Product, Design, QA, and stakeholders to ensure teams deliver value effectively.
• Experience of overseeing incremental delivery using Agile methodologies, guiding flow, delivery metrics, and continuous process improvement.
• Experience of promoting operational excellence, including planning for failure, incident learning, and using quality and reliability insights to improve future outcomes.
• Experience of ensuring teams maintain accurate, actionable technical documentation, such as APIs, runbooks, onboarding materials, and operational guides.
• Knowledge of modern release paradigms, deployment strategies, and governance practices to enable safe, observable, and high-quality delivery.

• Metrics driven approach to delivery (required).
• Experience leading agile teams, managing and coaching team members (required).
• Demonstrable understanding of modern software engineering and quality assurance best practice (required).
• Flexible communications styles to manage stakeholders from different areas of the business (required).
• Delivery focused, with the leadership skills to drive the team to succeed (required).
• Self-motivated, with excellent problem-solving skills and a drive for improvement (required).
• Mentored and coached team members (required).
• Passion for keeping up to date with new and emerging technologies and ways of working (required).
• Experience of development as a team member or leader (required).
• Experience building or supporting services on AWS (preferred).
• Worked with and supported remote team members (preferred).
• Been part of a recruitment panel (either as hiring team manager or participant) (preferred).
• Use of AI in the SDLC (preferred).

• A competitive rate of pay and pension contribution (£70,000 - 90,000) (required).
• Generous discretionary bonus schemes, incentives and competitions (required).
• An annual leave entitlement that increases with length of service (required).
• Access to an online GP 24/7, 365 days a year for you and your immediate family (required).
• Employee wellbeing support through our Employee Assistance Programme (required).
• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay (required).
• Long Service Recognition (required).
• Access to a pay day savings scheme, financial coach and up to 40% of your earned wage ahead of payday, through Wagestream (required).

Betfred is a betting and gaming company that has operated for over 50 years, founded by Fred and Peter Done. It runs more than 1,300 betting shops and employs around 9,500 people, combining a large retail estate with online sports betting and gaming. In 2019 it entered the US sports betting market as Betfred Sportsbook, now operating in several states, and has established a presence in South Africa, where it holds a majority stake in the online betting company LottoStar. Headquartered in Warrington, England, Betfred emphasises customer service and responsible gambling across its operations.

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