Lead Software Engineer

Change your career, change lives

At The Open University, we believe that where you start in life should not limit where you can go. Established over 50 years ago, we are committed to making high-quality education accessible to anyone, anywhere. Through our unique approach to distance and online learning, we have transformed millions of lives by opening opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach.

The Open University is the UK's largest university, a world leader in flexible part-time education, combining a mission to widen access to higher education with research excellence, transforming lives through education. 

Our mission is to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. As one of the world’s leading providers of flexible learning, we continue to innovate and evolve, helping students develop the skills, knowledge and confidence to succeed throughout their lives and careers. Find out more about us and our mission by watching this short video (you will be taken to YouTube by clicking this link).

About Digital Services

Digital Services is at the heart of delivering life-changing learning experiences that enrich society. We combine trusted design, data expertise and modern technology to create, run and continuously improve the digital services that support students, staff and the wider University community.

We work in multidisciplinary teams to solve meaningful problems, deliver value iteratively and ensure that our services are secure, reliable and accessible. Whether supporting student journeys, enabling teaching and learning, or providing the technology foundations that power the University, our work has a direct impact on thousands of people every day.

Our objectives are to:

• Enhance the student and staff experience through simple, evidence-based solutions.
• Deliver value iteratively, securely and at pace, balancing innovation, quality and operational excellence.
• Foster a vibrant and supportive workplace that embraces continuous learning, growth and collaboration, empowering everyone to succeed.

About the Role

As a Lead Software Engineer (known internally as a Lead Engineer), you will play a key role in shaping and operating the digital products and platforms that enable the University’s mission, helping teams deliver sustainable, resilient and valuable services for students and staff.

You will work in close partnership with the Product Manager and Delivery Manager within a multidisciplinary product team. You will also report to and align with the Group Engineering Lead on engineering standards, capability and technical direction. The Lead Software Engineer is the technical co-owner of one or more digital products or services. Working with the Product Manager, the role helps establish direction, understand constraints, make informed investment choices and ensure that the product delivers sustainable value. The successful candidate will be accountable for technical direction, quality, health and sustainability throughout the full lifecycle.

The role is deliberately broader than application development alone. Accountability spans the technical system needed to deliver and operate the product effectively, including architecture, software, infrastructure, environments, configuration, delivery pipelines, automated testing, security, observability, resilience and operational support. The successful candidate will provides technical coaching and mentoring, alongside formal line-management responsibility.

For more information about the role, a fully detailed role profile can be found here.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the product’s end-to-end technical lifecycle, from discovery and architecture through build, deployment, live operation, evolution and retirement.
• Set technical vision and direction across architecture, software, infrastructure, environments, CI/CD, automated testing, security, observability, resilience and support.
• Remain hands-on; design, build, test, review, deploy and operate high-quality software, while tackling complex technical and production problems.
• Work with the Product Manager to explain technical feasibility, estimate work, expose dependencies and ensure non-functional requirements are addressed.
• Balance user and organisational outcomes with technical risk, cost, delivery speed, technical debt and long-term sustainability.
• Build operability, maintainability, accessibility, security, resilience and supportability into solutions from the outset.
• Lead the technical response to incidents, use evidence and operational insights to address root causes, and improve reliability.
• Create shared ownership by coaching engineers, enabling sound decisions and avoiding technical bottlenecks or single points of failure.
• Contribute to engineering standards, patterns, technical strategy and the wider engineering community of practice.
• Identify, evaluate and introduce emerging practices and tools, including the responsible use of AI to improve engineering outcomes.

For more information about the responsibilities of this role, a fully detailed role profile can be found here.

About You

Essential Experience:

These are the core requirements. We are looking for evidence that you have already operated with comparable technical scope and accountability.

• End-to-end technical ownership of a production digital product or service through discovery, delivery and live operation.
• Accountability for technical outcomes across architecture, software engineering, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, automated testing, security, observability and resilience.
• Hands-on engineering experience sufficient to design solutions, write and review maintainable code, and influence implementation quality.
• Operating and supporting production services, including incident diagnosis, root-cause improvement and reliability work.
• Creating automated testing and safe, repeatable deployment pipelines as integral parts of software delivery.
• Making pragmatic architectural decisions and managing technical debt, vulnerabilities, obsolescence and lifecycle risk.
• Leading technical delivery in a multidisciplinary product team and working with Product to make evidence-based trade-offs.
• Coaching engineers and building collective ownership without becoming the team’s decision-making bottleneck.

Desirable Experience:

• Leading modernisation or migration of established production services.
• Contributing to engineering communities of practice, standards or reusable patterns beyond a single team.
• Using operational data, user feedback and delivery measures to drive continuous improvement.
• Evaluating and introducing new engineering tools or practices, including responsible AI-assisted development.

Technology Landscape:

Depending on the team, you may work with: C# and .NET; Microsoft Azure; RESTful APIs and distributed systems; React and Next.js; headless CMS platforms; Terraform and Infrastructure as Code; GitHub and Azure DevOps; CI/CD; Playwright and other automated testing frameworks; containers and cloud-native technologies;