Job Description

Job Title: Engineering Lead
Contract Type: Permanent
Location: Alderley Edge / Edinburgh
Working style: Hybrid 50% home/office based
Closing date: 23rd Jan 2026
The Core Engineering team at Royal London is growing, and we need an Engineering Lead to help transform our core engineering platform into something teams genuinely love to use.
The Engineering Lead provides hands-on technical leadership and delivery ownership across one or more engineering teams, ensuring solutions are well designed, secure and aligned to Core Engineering and product priorities. They lead through technical direction, mentoring and influence rather than line management.
Core Engineering provides shared platforms, services, standards and key capabilities that allow product and delivery teams to build, run and scale software safely, quickly and consistently. You will work across modern Saas, cloud and platform technologies, helping teams design and deliver services that are secure, resilient and observable by default. What you build will be used by dozens of teams across Royal London.
About the role

• Lead, design and own the technical direction of solutions delivered and owned by Core Engineering
• Contribute to quarterly and strategic planning
• Hands-on technical leadership and contribution
• Act as a mentor and technical coach to engineers internally and externally to Core Engineering
• Ensure architecture, security and engineering standards are applied consistently
• Contribute to the evolution of engineering standards and tooling practices
• Drive the use of metrics, monitoring and observability to improve reliability and delivery confidence

About you

• You have strong experience as a senior engineer or technical lead in a modern engineering environment.
• Comfortable owning technical plans, estimates and delivery commitments.
• You enjoy mentoring and developing engineers, even without formal line management.
• You can influence across teams through credibility, clarity and collaboration.
• You are comfortable working within security, risk and governance frameworks.
• Experience working with cloud-based and SaaS platforms, Azure preferred.
• Experience creating Terraform modules with a focus on code that is reusable and maintainable.
• Exposure to, and an understanding of, TLS, mTLS, PKI infrastructure and how it plays a role in modern infrastructure.
• Deep understanding of SDLC and modern CI/CD practices (Git, YAML) and configuring and managing build agents/runners across Windows and Linux environments.
• Hands on experience with Cloud and On-premises networking including patterns, traffic management and security fundamentals and the ability to apply them in real world scenarios.

We're hiring for potential as well as experience. If you think you could thrive in this role, we'd love to hear from you, even if you don't meet every requirement on paper.
About Royal London
We're the UK's largest mutual life, pensions and investment company, offering protection, long-term savings and asset management products and services. Our People Promise to our colleagues is that we will all work somewhere inclusive, responsible, enjoyable and fulfilling. This is underpinned by our Spirit of Royal London values; Empowered, Trustworthy, Collaborate, Achieve.
We've always been proud to reward employees by offering great workplace benefits such as 28 days annual leave in addition to bank holidays, an up to 14% employer matching pension scheme and private medical insurance. You can see all our benefits here - Our Benefits
Inclusion, diversity and belonging
We're an Inclusive employer. We celebrate and value different backgrounds and cultures across Royal London. Our diverse people and perspectives give us a range of skills which are recognised and respected - whatever their background.

Skills Required