Lead Software Engineer

Our Team: How We Enrich Everyday Life
You’ll be joining Bauer Media Audio (BMA), Europe’s biggest commercial audio broadcaster, connecting audiences across nine markets to the music, stories and experiences they love. Bauer Media Audio is making a significant investment in a new in‑house software development hub in Manchester. This new hub reinforces Manchester’s position as a key technology centre for Bauer Media Audio, alongside its existing locations. We’re creating a new development team to build innovative business-critical solutions that will power Bauer Media’s audio platform of the future. Our team is built around squads, each aligned to a distinct value stream, with a layer of cross-squad roles – people whose expertise and support spans the whole team. Each squad will be led by a Product Manager and Lead Engineer, working in partnership and jointly accountable for their squad's work and outcomes. Squads are intentionally small – typically around five to six engineers – keeping them focused, collaborative, and able to move quickly. Our team thrives on collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to delivering high-quality, scalable solutions, working closely with product and technology peers to ensure our platforms meet the evolving needs of the business and our international markets.

The Difference You Will Make
As Lead Engineer, you will combine hands-on technical contribution with the day-to-day leadership and people management of a software engineering squad within our new engineering team. You will work alongside your team, writing and reviewing code, guiding technical decisions, maintaining engineering standards, supporting the growth of individual engineers, and acting as the connective tissue between your squad and the broader engineering organisation.

You will work closely with the Director of Engineering and leaders from adjacent disciplines to ensure your team’s work aligns with our technical direction and product priorities.

You will lead with empathy and clarity to foster a culture of continuous improvement, shared ownership, and engineering excellence within your squad. Team leadership roles are vital to our success so you will play a key role in helping to create a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment that is psychologically safe, where everyone can be their authentic selves and do their best work, every day.

Your Role
Grow your team

• Support your engineers’ career development and build a motivated, high-performing squad through regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and by creating individual growth plans.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers – fostering a continuous improvement culture and helping the team build technical confidence and skills.

Contribute technically

• Write and review code as an active contributor to your squad’s delivery – guiding by example on quality, maintainability, and best practice.

• Guide architectural decisions and technical direction within your squad and contribute to broader engineering discussions.

Drive delivery and planning

• Plan and manage squad capacity across projects – forecast hiring needs and allocating resources effectively to meet delivery commitments.

• Participate in roadmap, refinement, and sprint planning sessions – working closely with Product colleagues and adjacent discipline leads, providing technical input, ensuring clear scoping, and surfacing dependencies and risks early.

Uphold engineering standards

• Define and sustain coding standards and review processes – conducting code reviews focused on quality, maintainability, and consistency.

• Track and manage technical debt within your squad – balancing debt reduction with feature delivery and escalating systemic issues where needed.

Ensure operational excellence

• Participate in the in-hours and out-of-hours incident management rotas, providing hands-on technical support and clear, calm communication during high-pressure situations.

• Advocate for the ‘you build it, you run it’ ethos – ensuring your squad is equipped to deploy, operate, and support the systems they build as part of a DevOps culture where second line out of hours support is the expectation.
  
  

What we are looking for
Experience of some but not necessarily all of the following:
Technical capability

• Solid hands-on software engineering experience, with sufficient depth across full-stack or backend development to guide technical decisions, review code meaningfully, and set the standard for your squad.

• Familiarity with our core stack — Node/TypeScript, React, Java, AWS, Kubernetes, and Kafka — or a comparable modern stack; deep expertise in some areas, with the breadth to engage credibly across the rest.

• A strong grasp of software architecture principles — microservices, APIs, and cloud-based deployment — and the ability to guide your squad's technical direction within a broader engineering strategy.

• Modern engineering practices: CI/CD, containerisation, version control workflows, code review, testing strategies, and observability.

• Security best practices embedded across the development lifecycle, with the ability to guide your squad to do the same.

• An awareness of AI trends within engineering and an interest in AI-assisted development tooling – understanding how these tools can improve your squad's productivity and code quality.

Leadership and people skills

• Leading or mentoring with a servant-leadership mindset and a genuine focus on the growth and wellbeing of your colleagues.

• Communicating with a range of people and organisational roles, managing stakeholder expectations, representing your team’s needs, and fostering collaboration across multidisciplinary teams.

• Acting as an escalation point for your team, supporting them through complex or time-sensitive situations.

• Taking an organised and structured approach to planning, managing priorities and keeping delivery on track.

Industry and delivery experience

• Leading a software engineering team or squad in a product-led, multidisciplinary organisation, with a track record of consistent, quality delivery.

• Agile software delivery practices and methodologies – with the experience to implement the right approach for your squad's context; SCRUM experience is a plus.

• Adapting to evolving business priorities, communicating calmly and clearly when under pressure.

• Media, audio streaming, or consumer platform experience is a plus.
  
  

Working Pattern and Location
This is a permanent, hybrid, full-time role with an in-office presence twice a week in our Manchester hub. Like all roles in the team, this one includes participation in incident management rotas – we schedule these collaboratively, taking into account everyone's responsibilities and commitments outside of work.