Engineering Lead - #2159632

• We’re a SaaS scale up and one of the fastest growing tech companies in the North.
• There’s 90+ of us around the UK with our HQ in Leeds.
• Our software is award-winning and used by 100,000s of students at over 1,000 universities & colleges worldwide.
• We’re growing so we can achieve our mission to support 1 million students to become better learners by 2030.

Career track: MG4

Unit: Learner Experience

As Engineering Lead you'll partner directly with the CPO to drive delivery, engineering standards, and team health as we build Genio's next flagship product. In this fast-paced, early-stage environment, you lead through empowerment rather than doing the work yourself; setting up your Tech Leads for success, fostering a culture of rapid AI-assisted experimentation, and ensuring problems are tackled early. Bringing sharp technical understanding to challenge assumptions and spot risk, you'll balance speed with smart standards to turn product priorities into shipped, learnable product. 

You will be responsible for:

• Delivery Leadership: Run delivery for the Learning Experience team, from priority to shipped product. Ensure the team's delivery rhythm and visibility across planning, prioritisation, and release, keeping cycle times short and progress visible. Work with the CPO to translate product priorities and validation goals into sequenced engineering work, provide an honest view of what is achievable within the budget, remove blockers quickly, and ensure engineers are empowered to solve learner problems.
• Standards and Ways of Working: Bring genuine technical understanding to the team's engineering standards and ways of working, calibrated to a validation-stage product: fast by default, disciplined where it counts. Drive a culture of experimentation and fast feedback, champion AI-assisted engineering across the team, and ensure the team meets non-negotiable security and compliance standards set by Operations.
• Team Development & Culture: Manage software engineers directly through regular 1-on-1s, development plans, performance management, and honest, timely feedback. Build a culture of collaboration, inclusiveness, trust, and respect. Coach team members on quality, communication, and best practices, address skill gaps, and take an active role in recruitment.
• Product Partnership: Work closely with the Product Manager (who owns what and why) and Principal Engineer (who owns architecture), while owning the how and ensuring it ships. Bring genuine data proficiency so instrumentation, measurement, and learning are part of every release, and assist in communicating company goals and vision to provide clear direction for the team.

Role Outcomes: 

• Fast, dependable delivery: the team ships quickly and predictably, so product hypotheses are tested with real learners at the pace validation demands.
• A culture of rapid iteration and experimentation: the team defaults to shipping, measuring, and learning, with AI-assisted development used wherever it compounds speed.
• Standards that fit the stage: quality, security, and engineering discipline are held where they matter, and deliberately lightweight where they don't yet, with trade-offs made consciously.
• A high-performing, motivated team: engineers are coached, developed, stretched, and supported, with clear expectations and honest feedback.
• A well-run budget: the team's size, tooling, and spend stay within what has been agreed, and the CPO always has a concrete view of what the current budget can deliver.

You will be working most closely with our Chief Product Officer, Principal Engineer (Learning Experience), Tech Leads, Engineers, Senior Data Engineer, Learner Research and Design colleagues, Product Managers, and Principal Platform Engineer (Operations).

This role reports directly into the Chief Product Officer.

Essential:

• Engineering Leadership Experience: Directly leading and managing engineers, ideally in an early-stage or new product environment.
• Hands-on Engineering Depth: Deep experience in hands-on software engineering roles, working with well-crafted and maintainable code, with sound judgement about when craft pays back and when speed wins.
• Strong Delivery Instincts: Short cycles, visible progress, and honest communication when commitments are at risk.
• Crisis-Capable: Able to take ownership of a live problem end-to-end and see it through without escalating back or waiting for direction.
• AI Fluency: Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development and an appetite to push what it makes possible.
• Data Proficiency: Comfortable using product analytics and experiment results to steer the team's work, and able to bring Product Managers and others along in that reasoning.
• Pragmatic Vision: Long-term focused where it matters—supporting structures and habits that will scale if the platform succeeds, without investing prematurely in capabilities or abstractions that are not yet justified by validated needs.
• Flexible Mindset: Passionate views, loosely held—able to argue your point of view passionately, but willing to accept that the needs of others, the group, or the business may mean other approaches are adopted.

Bonus / Nice to have:

• Stage-Appropriate Governance: Experience balancing fast-paced product validation and experimentation with strict operational, security, and compliance standards.

£115,000 - £125,000 dependent upon experience

33 days annual leave (Inclusive of bank holidays)

3 gifted days off at Christmas

EMI Share Options Scheme

Generous individual learning and training allowance

Truly flexible hours to suit when you work best

Full home working set up and beautiful collaborative office space

Free Leeds City Centre office parking

Nomad working policy with family travel insurance

Enhanced 26 weeks maternity and 4 weeks paternity (fully paid)

Health cash plan (from glasses to massages)

6% employer pension contribution

Our beautiful office space in Leeds is our key hub for collaboration, and we love to get together in person. We operate a flexible hybrid working model. While we don’t require a set number of days in the office, we’re happy to discuss ways of working at interview. If you have any questions in the meantime please reach out to [email protected] 

We’ll review your application and provide a response within 1 week. Even if it’s not the news you’d hoped for, we appreciate it’s good to know either way.

If we invite you to meet with us for interview, here’s an overview of what the process will look like:

1. Screening interview with someone in our Recruitment team (30 minutes).
2. Stage one: interview with a small panel of interviewers including; the CEO, CPO, and another Genio colleague (1 hour). This will include a scenario with competency and behavioural questions. 
3. A take-home task to be completed ahead of the second stage interview, which will be presented during the interview. 
4. Stage two: Task presentation and discussion, leadership focussed behavioural questions and an open conversation (90 minutes)
5. Final stage: Culture and values interview (1 hour)

Ahead of your interview you will receive a confirmation email outlining who you’ll be meeting and when, anything you’ll need to prepare in advance and any resources we think you might find helpful.