Lead Software Engineer

Contract type: Permanent
Location: Alderley Park, Glasgow
Working style: Hybrid 50% home/office based

Job Summary

Royal London is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to lead the Identity and Access Management application delivery team, CIAM, within the Digital space at Royal London. This role is focused on modern software & application engineering: designing, building and operating customer-facing and internal digital services with a strong emphasis on Azure-based application development using C#/.NET, within an Agile delivery environment.

You will play a key technical leadership role within a cross-functional squad, shaping solution design and delivery while remaining hands-on. You will lead by example, building high-quality, secure, and resilient applications, while supporting and developing other engineers.

This role is within a team that delivers Identity and Access Management solutions, so knowledge within this domain is essential, experience would be advantageous.

This is an application-focused role, working closely with product, architecture, cloud, and mobile teams to deliver valuable outcomes for customers and colleagues.

About the role

You are a hands-on technical leader who enjoys designing and building well-engineered applications. You care deeply about software quality, security, resilience and operability, and you take pride in leaving systems better than you found them.

You are comfortable balancing:

• Technical leadership and design decisions.
• Delivery accountability.
• Mentoring and supporting engineers.

You thrive in a collaborative, product-focused environment where engineering judgement matters. You will:

• Lead the design and development of complex systems, ensuring both functional and non-functional requirements are met.
• Build, test and operate C#/.NET back-end services deployed in Azure.
• Carry out technical design and impact assessments for changes to new and existing applications.
• Ensure agreed designs and documentation are produced to the required standard ahead of delivery.
• Champion engineering best practice, including clean code, automated testing and observability.
• Work closely with Architects, Testers, Product Owners, Analysts and stakeholders to deliver high-quality outcomes.
• Support the day-to-day operation of live applications, including incident investigation and resolution.
• Mentor and develop other engineers, contributing to a strong and supportive engineering culture.
• Contribute to the evolution of software engineering practice across Royal London.

About you

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong software engineering background, with experience leading delivery across the full application development lifecycle.
• Proven experience designing, building and maintaining modern web applications with strong expertise in C# / .NET, and working knowledge of the complementary stack.
• Identity and Access Management architecture, implementation and support.
• OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT and secure token-based integration patterns.
• Strong experience building and running applications in Azure cloud environments, with an emphasis on application-level design, resilience and security rather than platform or DevOps specialism.
• Strong understanding of API-driven and service-based architecture.
• Experience using CI/CD pipelines to build, test and deploy application code safely and repeatedly.
• Strong focus on application quality including testing, performance, security, resilience and operational readiness.
• Ability to work autonomously, making sound technical decisions with limited supervision.
• Experience of acting as a technical lead and mentor, supporting engineers at different career stages.
• A mindset of continuous improvement, actively developing your own skills and promoting engineering best practice.
• Ability to communicate clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to investigate, troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues. 

Nice to Have

• Experience with Angular (or similar front-end frameworks).
• Experience with common Azure services used in application delivery, such as App Services, Functions, Storage, Key Vault and Application Insights.
• Experience with API Management (e.g. Azure APIM) as part of application integration.
• Exposure to mobile application development (iOS, Android and/or cross-platform frameworks) or experience supporting mobile apps via backend services.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Bicep or Terraform), without this being the primary focus of the role.

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.

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.