Permanent | Hybrid Working | South East England

We are partnering with a leading organisation operating in a complex, real-time operational environment to recruit a Technical Lead within its Integrated Operations and Planning technology domain.

This role sits at the heart of mission-critical systems that power operational planning and real-time control functions. The product suite underpins essential processes such as workforce planning, scheduling, disruption management and integrated control operations.

You will shape the technical direction of these platforms, ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient and future-ready. Working closely with Product and Delivery leadership, you will balance business priorities with sound engineering decisions to deliver measurable operational value.

Role Purpose

• Provide technical leadership for a product team, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure and fit for purpose
• Act as the technical authority across product, delivery and engineering collaboration
• Guide and mentor engineers, promoting sustainable engineering practices across the full product lifecycle
• Balance short-term delivery objectives with long-term maintainability, resilience and cost-effectiveness

Key Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on leadership, setting coding standards and reviewing designs to ensure best practice in security, performance and integration
• Define and own technical architecture across operational planning and control products
• Partner with Product Managers to translate business requirements into technical designs, effort estimates and roadmaps
• Work with Delivery Leads to align technical feasibility with delivery timelines, identifying risks and dependencies early
• Champion modern engineering practices including CI/CD, cloud-native design, API-first development and automated testing
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture and governance forums to ensure alignment with broader technology strategy and standards
• Act as a trusted advisor to operational stakeholders, clearly articulating technical trade-offs and outcomes
• Mentor and develop engineers, fostering a high-performing, continuously improving team culture
• Lead root cause analysis and resolution of critical production issues impacting live operations

Experience & Skills Required

• Proven experience as a Technical Lead or Principal Engineer within large-scale, mission-critical systems
• Strong software engineering background with expertise in at least one major development stack (e.g. Java, .NET, Python or optimisation tooling)
• Experience designing and delivering cloud-native solutions (AWS preferred), with strong knowledge of APIs, event-driven architecture and microservices
• Familiarity with operational planning, scheduling or real-time control systems within transport or similarly complex environments (desirable)
• Strong understanding of DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and observability
• Experience working within Agile delivery environments and shaping effective team ways of working
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to balance time, cost and technical debt considerations
• Ability to influence stakeholders at all levels, translating technical concepts into clear business value
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and building high-performing teams
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or equivalent practical experience