Modelling Software Engineering Manager

Role Overview

• Build and sustain a team that is high performing and a genuinely good place to work — create an environment where engineers are challenged by their work, recognised for their contributions, and comfortable raising problems early, to you and to each other. This is the outcome the rest of the role serves.
• Lead the people in the team and their development: line-manage the team's most senior engineers — their 1:1s, performance reviews, development plans, and career conversations — and own the line-management function across the whole team, setting standards, making and managing line-management assignments, training squad leads to manage their engineers well, and acting as the escalation point for any situation heading toward a formal performance or HR process.
• Own delivery across the team's 3–4 squads: sprint cadence, capacity planning, blocker removal, and process quality; maintain enough technical visibility to distinguish delivery problems from technical ones.
• Own and continually raise the bar on the team's engineering delivery practices — modern Agile / Continuous Delivery, healthy sprint flow, and the disciplines that make delivery predictable and high quality.
• Continuously improve how the team delivers: identify what is slowing the team down and drive the changes that fix it — process, tooling, and ways of working — including applying AI tooling where it measurably reduces friction or improves delivery signal (requirements gathering, flow metrics, sprint analytics, delivery communications).
• Partner with Product to align delivery with business outcomes — translate engineering capacity and delivery reality into the prioritisation conversation so the team is always working on what matters most commercially.
• Identify training needs across the team and own a plan to address them — technical skills gaps, process, and organisational effectiveness — then track whether it is making a difference.
• Build and own recruitment plans for the team, running the hiring process end-to-end: job specs, screening, interview coordination, and hiring recommendations.
• Own the cross-team people and process interfaces — with Product Engineering and with the Modelling team — ensuring working relationships are productive, dependencies are tracked, and ownership is unambiguous.

Requirements

• 4–6+ years of engineering management experience with a track record of managing mixed technical teams.
• A software engineering background — you have written production code in a professional context and can hold a technically credible conversation with a Senior or Principal engineer; you understand the work, not just the process around it.
• Hands-on experience implementing modern Agile / Continuous Delivery practices in a software team — you have raised a team's delivery maturity, not just operated within someone else's process.
• Proven track record of running real performance conversations: direct feedback, development plans, and follow-through — not just annual reviews.
• Strong delivery instincts — you know when a sprint is quietly going off the rails, and you can tell whether the root cause is technical or organisational.
• Experience owning hiring end-to-end: you have run a recruitment pipeline and can evaluate technical candidates in context.
• A direct communicator — you escalate clearly and do not let difficult conversations drift.
• Experience managing engineers across both platform/infrastructure and domain-specific software (scientific computing, data engineering, fintech, or similar).
• Commercial awareness — you connect engineering delivery to business outcomes and partner effectively with product and commercial stakeholders.
• Demonstrable interest in applying AI tooling to engineering delivery — requirements tooling, flow analytics, sprint automation; hands-on experience doing so is a strong plus.

Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails

Benefits

• Private Medical Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Parental Support
• Salary-Exchange Pension
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Local Oxford Discounts
• Cycle-to-work Scheme
• Flu Jabs