Engineering Manager - Contract

We are looking an highly experience Engineering Manager for our central government focused client on a 12 months contract.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and coach engineering teams, ensuring delivery of high-quality, maintainable, and secure solutions.

• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Delivery Managers, and Architects to align technical direction with business outcomes.

• Oversee technical strategy, architecture decisions, and development standards.

• Ensure teams follow GDS service standards and meet accessibility, security, and performance requirements.

• Build and maintain a strong engineering culture, championing best practices and continuous improvement.

• Support recruitment, onboarding, and career development of engineers.

• Manage cross-team dependencies, risks, and delivery timelines.

• Act as the primary technical escalation point for engineering challenges.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Proven Engineering Manager experience within a UK Government department or large-scale public sector programme.

• Strong background in software engineering (Java, Node.js, .NET, or similar modern stack).

• Experience leading Agile delivery teams (Scrum/Kanban) in GDS-compliant projects.

• Excellent stakeholder engagement skills with the ability to communicate technical decisions to non-technical audiences.

• Experience implementing and enforcing engineering standards, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and DevOps practices.

• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS/Azure) and containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes).

• Active SC clearance (essential).

Desirable Skills

• Previous leadership in multi-supplier or multi-vendor delivery environments.

• Experience with microservices architecture and event-driven systems.

• Familiarity with accessibility (WCAG) compliance and security-by-design principles.

• Previous experience mentoring tech leads and senior developers.