Imperial

Role Description We are looking for a highly experienced and hands-on Technical Lead to provide senior technical leadership across the organisation. This is not a traditional management role focused only on people leadership or delivery coordination. We are looking for someone who still enjoys coding, solving technical problems, shaping architecture, and mentoring engineers. You will play a key role in: - Defining scalable architecture across our growing product portfolio - Leading the adoption of AI-assisted development practices - Strengthening engineering quality, security, and compliance standards - Driving consistency and technical excellence across teams This role combines architecture, hands-on engineering, AI strategy, mentoring, and technical leadership. You will have the opportunity to work across both greenfield development and established legacy products, helping modernise existing platforms while also shaping the future architecture and technical direction of new solutions. This role offers the chance to influence technology decisions across the full product lifecycle, from innovation and new product development through to optimisation and transformation of existing systems. Qualifications - Experience with secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and performance optimisation - Senior engineering, architecture, or technical leadership experience, leading technical direction across complex software products or platforms - Hands-on software engineering capability with recent production coding experience - Strong proficiency in enterprise languages (C#, Java, or similar) and cloud platforms, with hands-on Azure experience - Demonstrable experience driving AI-assisted development in real engineering teams - hands-on with AI-powered development tools, prompt engineering, and LLM-based workflows, plus an understanding of AI governance and responsible AI practices - Strong grasp of software architecture, scalable system design, DevOps, CI/CD, and automation tooling - Ability to mentor and influence technical teams, with strong communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders Requirements - Define and maintain the technical architecture across all products - Lead architectural decision-making and technical direction - Ensure solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with business needs - Recommend technologies, frameworks, and platforms to support future growth - Establish engineering standards, design patterns, and best practices - Improve consistency and collaboration across products and engineering teams - Manage the long-term technical roadmap, including technical debt prioritisation - Remain actively involved in coding and technical delivery - Contribute directly to architecture, development, troubleshooting, and code reviews - Lead by example through high-quality engineering practices - Support teams with complex technical challenges and escalation points - Act as a senior technical authority across engineering teams - Balance engineering decisions across speed, scalability, security, and maintainability - Lead secure-by-design engineering practices - Support ISO 27001 and ISO/IEC 42001 initiatives - Define and enforce coding standards, review processes, and quality expectations - Improve engineering quality metrics and continuous improvement practices - Support performance optimisation, resilience, scalability, and reliability - Lead vulnerability remediation and security improvement activities - Architect and improve CI/CD pipelines - Champion infrastructure-as-code and deployment automation - Define standards for automated testing and release processes - Support release governance and environment management - Drive modern engineering automation practices - Mentor and coach developers across all experience levels - Support technical growth and engineering excellence - Encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams - Identify skills gaps and support development planning - Support technical recruitment, onboarding, and assessments - Help shape technical career progression pathways Benefits - Regular worker type - Number of openings available: 1