Lead Software Engineer

The Role

Lead Software Engineer

We’re looking for a Lead Engineer to help bring to life, through technology, the Commercial teams’ ambitions for the future of advertising.

This is a hands-on leadership role where you will lead and inspire a multidisciplinary team of engineers while remaining close to the technical detail. You’ll be accountable for engineering practices, delivery quality and outcomes across your team’s services and applications — from high-level design through to production operations.

Working closely with Product Managers, Designers, QA and fellow engineering leaders, you’ll define what success looks like for your team, reduce delivery risk, and ensure high-quality, scalable solutions reach production efficiently. You’ll shape both the technical direction and the team culture, creating an environment where engineers can do their best work.

If you enjoy combining technical depth with people leadership and want to shape platforms used at massive scale, this is a brilliant opportunity to make a real impact.

The team

Commercial Technology & Change (CT&C) is a key group within ITV’s Media & Entertainment business, with several software and data engineering teams responsible for defining and overseeing the operational aspects across our strategic pillars driving innovation with a focus on delivery value to our business. We are committed to building and maintaining efficient delivery capabilities, ensuring the successful execution of projects with a focus on quality and efficiency.

Within CT&C, our software engineering team helps bring to life, through technology, the Commercial teams’ ambitions for the future of advertisement. We focus on building automation, simplifying systems and converging Linear and Addressable propositions that reach millions of people across our Channels and Apps, while bringing monetary value back to ITV so we can continue making what matters.

Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership & Engineering Accountability: Line manage and mentor a multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, providing technical leadership, coaching and skills development, setting objectives and performance standards, supporting recruitment, and inspiring a high-performing, inclusive and motivated team culture, while remaining accountable for the quality and output of your team’s services and applications.

• Product Design & Delivery: Partner with Product Managers, Designers and QA to scope and refine requirements, translate business needs into high and low-level designs, and lead the development, delivery and ongoing maintenance of scalable features, infrastructure and services that deliver measurable value.
• Full Stack Engineering Ownership: Oversee the design and implementation of user-centric front-end experiences using TypeScript/JavaScript and modern web technologies, alongside back-end cloud infrastructure, APIs, databases and microservices that support reliable, secure and scalable products.
• Quality, Performance & Reliability: Define quality standards and non-functional requirements, implement automated testing and observability practices, and proactively monitor, optimise and troubleshoot applications, data pipelines and workflows to ensure high performance, resilience and operational stability.
• Support, Operations & Security: Collaborate with QA, DevOps and support teams to resolve incidents, address root causes and maintain production stability, while adhering to architecture governance, DevOps and DevSecOps best practices and ensuring compliance with ITV data privacy and security standards.
• Collaboration & Communication: Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Design, QA and Delivery to provide engineering guidance, document technical solutions and clearly communicate complex concepts to both technical and business audiences.
• Continuous Improvement & Ways of Working: Champion Agile and engineering best practices including peer reviews, CI/CD, TDD, technical debt management and planning, while identifying opportunities for automation, process improvement and innovation, and actively contributing to ITV guilds and the wider engineering community.

Skills you’ll need (minimum criteria)

• At least 2+ years experience leading a small team of engineers
• Solid experience (typically 4–6+ years) in a senior software engineering role
• Strong programming and technology skills in one or more of the following TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Node.js, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Terraform, JSON
• Experience building user-centric front-end, back-end, or data and ML-driven operational applications
• Knowledge of AWS services and creating a cloud environment via IaC for a microservice architecture (e.g., S3, RDS, AWS infra, Lambda, CloudWatch, EventBridge, Step Functions etc)
• Working in an agile environment in green and brownfield environments
• Confident approaching development with TDD principles
• Embracing code quality and automation with CI/CD tooling
• Worked with source control systems such as Github
• Knowledge of serverless monitoring and debugging tools.
• Ability to write production-grade code including automated testing
• Experience in deploying code via CI/CD platforms (e.g. Github Actions, Jenkins)
• Familiarity with data modelling, database systems, and SQL optimization techniques.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical thinking, and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration abilities, with the ability to work effectively in a team environment.

Other things we’re looking for (key criteria)

• Knowledge of broadcast, OTT or advertising technology
• Experience working closely with Product, QA and Delivery functions
• Passion for building strong engineering culture
• Understanding of data governance, privacy and security principles
• DevOps/FinOps or platform engineering experience