Engineering Team Lead

Job Title: Engineering Team Lead

Location: Cardiff

Hybrid / Flexible Working

Salary: Up to £75,000 depending on experience plus a potential bonus up to £15,000

Stability, flexibility and the opportunity to work on greenfield projects within one of Europe’s leading financial experts, sound interesting to you?

LDMS - About Us

Founded in 2018, LDMS is part of the LC Financial Holdings group, a 3 pillar organisation that has over 950 employees across Europe. Together, we have an impressive track record of providing world class credit expertise that spans over 20 years.

We are a Fintech company focused on digital lending software, a market growing around 18% per year and set to be worth $27 billion by 2028. Given our expertise within the company and across the group we aim to be the leader in the space, and in order to do that we need a team of people who can not just write quality code but can think, create and challenge others to come up with the best solutions for our customers. We are an ambitious team with a pretty big ‘to do list’ including improving existing products, building new ones and delivering to new markets.

The Role

You’ll join the Engineering team at LDMS, reporting to Engineering Management and leading around 6–8 engineers organised into two teams that build financial software for our partners and clients.

This is a leadership role for someone with a strong engineering background who is passionate about growing engineers. Your two main focuses are your teams’ delivery output and the development of the people in them. You’ll spend most of your time coaching, unblocking and setting direction, staying close enough to the technical work to guide design decisions and support the team through reviews. That technical grounding is what makes you effective.

Key Responsibilities:

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Technical Leadership

• Set clear technical direction for your teams, keeping decisions aligned to team and product goals.

• Guide design and technical decisions and support a review culture that raises quality and teaches, rather than just approves.

• Spot technical debt early and work closely with your lead/senior engineers to ensure engineering standards are adopted across both teams.

Delivery and Execution

• Plan and track delivery across both teams, raising risks and scope changes early.

• Break complex work into deliverable increments with clear dependencies and acceptance criteria.

• Run delivery sessions and workshops, such as whiteboarding an area, to shape and unblock work.

• Keep an eye on dependencies between your teams and with other teams and flag them early.

• Make sensible trade-offs on scope, quality and pace under pressure, and keep delivery moving.

• Balance the team’s time between product features and technical debt.

• Keep the team’s ways of working lean and adaptable, using process and meetings where they genuinely help rather than running them by default.

People and Development

• Mentor and coach your engineers through guidance, review and honest career conversations.

• Run regular, structured one-to-ones focused on growth, wellbeing and clearing blockers.

• Give direct, evidence-based feedback and support each person’s development and progression.

• Interview and hire strong engineers into your teams.

• Build a strong team culture with high standards and psychological safety.

AI and Innovation

• Encourage the team to use AI where it clearly helps them work faster or produce better software, and to be honest about where it doesn’t.

• Make sensible use of AI and automation part of how the team works day to day, rather than something tried once and dropped.

• Use simple measures of how the team is doing to spot progress and catch work that’s slipping or running over.

Stakeholder and Communication

• Communicate your teams’ technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to product and non-technical colleagues.

• Manage stakeholder expectations proactively, so status updates contain no surprises.

• Escalate issues to Engineering Management at the right time and in the right way, with options rather than problems.

• Communicate release content to customers and support their delivery questions, giving confidence in what’s coming and when.

Requirements

Essential

• A strong understanding of how good software gets built (preferably hands-on in Java/Spring Boot), with the technical judgement to guide design decisions, PR reviews and assess quality across your teams.

• A proven track record of planning, tracking and delivering software projects, including managing dependencies and trade-offs.

• Experience managing stakeholders and communicating delivery status, risks and trade-offs clearly to non-technical and customer-facing audiences, in writing and in person.

• Line management experience, or a strong track record of coaching and mentoring with the readiness to take on formal line management.

• A genuine interest in progressing engineers’ careers.

• Comfortable using data and metrics to report progress and identify problems early.

Desirable

• An interest in using AI to help teams build software.

• Experience within the financial sector.

• Experience in front end development (preferably in React/Typescript).

• Experience working with modern Continuous Integration tooling, such as Jenkins.

• Experience debugging and troubleshooting issues using monitoring and observability tooling, such as Grafana, Prometheus or equivalent.

What’s important to us?

It’s safe to say our passion is tech, but we recognise that the people we hire and bring together are at the heart of the organisation. Over the years, we have acquired and recruited a pretty eclectic bunch with hobbies ranging from gaming to ultra marathon running, snowboarding to chess and hiking and climbing; However, what we do have in common are our values:

• Teamwork

• Merit

• Develop

• Honest

• Impactful

• Integrity

They may look like corporate jargon, but they mean something to us. If you can relate to the above, get in touch, as there’s a good chance that you’d be a great addition to the team.

Benefits

• Discretionary bonus*

• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)

• Opportunity to purchase additional annual leave

• 1 day birthday leave

• 1 day charity leave

• Private health insurance

• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)

• Season ticket loan for transport

• Eye care

• Pension (3% / 5% contribution)

• Salary sacrifice schemes (cycle to work and electric vehicle)

• Monthly socials

• Charity events

*The discretionary bonus will be pro-rata'd during your first year with the Company.