Software Developer Team Lead - 12 Month FTC

About the Company

At IMSERV, we're proud to be one of the UK's leading energy data and metering specialists. We deliver award-winning services to customers across the country, providing specialist metering technology for electricity, gas and water, alongside highly accurate energy data collection services.

About the Role

The purpose of the role is to lead the software engineering function for the Astral platform, taking ownership of the people, delivery, engineering standards, and ongoing development of the platform. This includes taking immediate responsibility for delivery across the current offshore and partner setup, establishing the cadence, estimation, and release discipline required to make delivery more predictable.

The role will also focus on raising engineering standards across documentation, testing, CI/CD, environment management, and release processes to ensure the platform can withstand external technical due diligence while maintaining delivery pace. A key focus will be reducing key-person dependency by ensuring knowledge, processes, and technical decisions are properly documented and embedded across the team.

The role will establish IMSERV's own engineering capability, develop a clear plan to reduce reliance on external partners, work closely with the Technical Architect to progress Astral towards a multi-tenant, API-first architecture, and ultimately leave behind a robust, well-documented and sustainable engineering operation that can continue effectively without the post-holder.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of the delivery cadence across the partner teams.
• Deliver the agreed programme milestones, including progress toward the multi-tenant, API-first architecture with the Technical Architect.
• Stand up IMSERV's own engineering capability alongside the partners: hire against an agreed plan, structure the team into cross-functional squads, and progressively bring critical knowledge and control in-house to cut key-person risk.
• Establish a delivery function (scrum and delivery management) rather than personally remaining the only person holding cadence together, and leave a documented, sustainable operation and a recruitment and operating plan for a permanent team or successor.
• Run and mature agile practice (planning, stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives); unblock teams and manage dependencies and the critical path.
• Provide honest, evidence-based delivery reporting to leadership, including realistic forecasts and early escalation of risk.
• Lead, manage, and develop the engineering team across full-stack, data, and cloud/DevOps disciplines.
• Manage IMSERV's offshore development and support partners as an effective, accountable extension of the team, including quality, SLAs, and onboarding to full operation.
• Run the Astral platform end to end: the portal, the API tier, data orchestration and rules engines.
• Set and enforce engineering standards: documentation, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, environment management, and release discipline.
• Embed AI coding tools into daily practice with appropriate review and quality controls, and take the platform's AI features into production reliably.

What you'll need

Knowledge & Qualifications

• Track record leading software engineering delivery for a live SaaS product, ideally through a re-platforming or single-tenant to multi-tenant transition.
• Genuinely hands-on technical credibility in the stack (C#/.NET, Angular, Azure), sufficient to set standards and earn the team's respect, without being the person who must write the code.
• Proven delivery leadership in an agile environment: has personally gripped an under-performing or under-planned delivery and made it predictable.
• Experience managing offshore and/or third-party delivery partners, and building an in-house team from a partner-led starting point.
• Strong product partnership instincts: comfortable shaping and sizing a backlog with a Product Owner and holding the line on scope.
• Evidence of raising engineering discipline (testing, CI/CD, documentation, release management) in a real organisation, not just advocating for it.
• Comfortable with a time-boxed, fixed-term remit: able to grip quickly, deliver within the term, and hand over a durable, well-documented operation rather than leaving the organisation dependent on them.

Skills

• Modern delivery practice: CI/CD, automated testing and DevOps culture, with evidence of raising these where they were weak without killing delivery pace.
• Practical, current use of AI coding assistants, and a working understanding of what shipping LLM-backed product features involves: evaluation, cost and safety.
• Able to lead remote and distributed engineers effectively.
• Credible in code review and architecture discussions; comfortable as the technical escalation point.

Benefits

• 28 days' holiday plus Bank Holidays
• Buy & sell annual leave scheme
• Up to a 10% bonus
• Enhanced salary sacrifice pension
• Life assurance (up to 6x salary )
• Simply Health plan (with upgrade options)
• Car salary sacrifice scheme

( Length of service and T&Cs apply)

Equal Opportunity Statement

At IMSERV, we're committed to building a team where everyone feels valued, respected and able to do their best work. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences and communities. A diverse team brings fresh perspectives, strengthens collaboration and helps us deliver the best possible service to our customers.

If you're interested in the role but don't meet every single requirement, we'd still encourage you to apply.

(Please note that we reserve the right to close this position before the expiry date.)