Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager

Location: Hybrid – 3 days office (Wilmslow HQ), 2 days from home

Salary: Competitive

We are 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

Lead multiple engineering teams to deliver secure, reliable, high-quality products at pace.

You will drive modern engineering practices, DevOps maturity and AI-enabled ways of working across both our products and software delivery processes.

Working closely with Product, Design, Architects and Tech Leads, you will help shape technical direction, improve delivery effectiveness, and coach teams to build, ship and operate software successfully.

We are looking for someone with strong hands-on experience using and scaling AI in engineering environments, particularly AI/agentic coding assistants, and AI-enabled product capabilities.

People Leadership

• Lead, coach, and support multiple cross-functional engineering teams and tech leads.
• Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Run regular 1:1s, provide clear feedback and support career development and performance management.
• Grow leadership capability within teams so decisions can be made effectively at the right level.
• Support hiring, onboarding and retention to build diverse, high-performing teams.

Technical Leadership and Engineering Excellence

• Provide technical leadership without becoming a bottleneck, enabling strong engineering decisions across teams.

Champion modern engineering practices including:

• TDD/BDD, Clean Code, pair, and mob programming
• Automated testing across unit, integration, end-to-end and performance levels
• Secure SDLC practices from design through deployment
• Work with architects and senior engineers to evolve robust, observable, secure and cost-effective cloud-native architectures.
• Maintain a strong understanding of technologies including:
• .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP, and related frameworks
• JavaScript/TypeScript, React and modern front-end development
• Relational and NoSQL databases

AI, Automation and Innovation

• Drive adoption of AI and automation within engineering workflows and product capabilities.
• Identify opportunities where AI can improve quality, reduce manual effort or enable new customer value.
• Lead effective adoption of AI/agentic coding assistants across coding, testing, documentation and operational workflows.
• Ensure AI usage aligns with security, privacy and compliance standards.
• Run lightweight experiments and spikes to validate AI use cases and measure impact.
• Collaborate with internal or external AI/ML specialists and vendors to integrate AI services into products and platforms.
• Support the full lifecycle of AI-enabled features from prototype through to production monitoring and operation.

Delivery and Stakeholder Management

• Partner with Product Managers and Product Owners to define outcomes, priorities, roadmaps and delivery plans.
• Ensure teams deliver small, frequent, high-quality increments and manage dependencies proactively.
• Communicate clearly with stakeholders on priorities, risks, trade-offs and delivery scope.
• Contribute to cross-team planning, portfolio alignment, and architectural review activities.

Process, Quality and Continuous Improvement

• Continuously improve team ways of working, agile delivery practices and operational processes.
• Establish clear standards for testing, release management, resilience and non-functional requirements.
• Use metrics and team feedback to improve delivery flow, reliability, stability and team health.
• Improve cross-team coordination around technical debt, releases, environments and operational change.

About you

Leadership and Management

• Significant experience leading software engineering teams delivering production systems.
• Experience managing multiple teams or complex product-focused engineering organisations.
• Proven ability to develop engineers and tech leads, manage performance effectively and improve team health.

Technical

• Strong background in modern software engineering, including experience with:
• .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP and related frameworks
• JavaScript/TypeScript, React and modern front-end technologies
• Relational and/or NoSQL databases
• Practical experience with:
• CI/CD pipelines and automated testing
• Cloud platforms such as Azure and/or AWS
• Containers and infrastructure-as-code tools including Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform or Ansible
• Monitoring, logging and performance analysis tooling

AI and Automation

• Practical experience using and rolling out AI/agentic coding assistants in engineering teams.
• Experience designing, integrating or operating AI-enabled product features.
• Ability to evaluate AI tools and approaches pragmatically across value, risk, cost and compliance considerations.

Behavioural

• Excellent communication skills across technical and business audiences.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making capability in complex environments.
• Collaborative, low-ego approach with strong cross-functional partnership skills.
• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on delivering measurable outcomes.

Nice to Have

• Experience in B2B SaaS and/or domains relevant to Citation including HR, Health & Safety, Certification, background screening or eLearning.
• Experience working across multiple business units or product portfolios.
• Experience leading distributed or remote teams.
• Previous exposure to ML/AI-focused engineering leadership environments.

Here’s a taste of the perks we roll out for our extraordinary team members:

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 weeks 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.