Lead Software Engineer

Hybrid from our Cardiff office, twice a week. 

About us:

Confused.com is the UK’s first comparison platform for car insurance. We’ve been helping customers since 2002 by empowering them to make better decisions around insurance and financial services. Our mission is simple: take away the confusion when comparing financial products and services to help you save time and money.

We’re part of RVU, a group of online brands (including Uswitch, Tempcover, and Money.co.uk) that empowers people to make confident decisions across a range of household services.

RVU’s purpose is to simplify complex marketplaces with intuitive and accessible applications that genuinely improve people’s lives. Saving a few hundred pounds a year on bills makes a fundamental difference to vulnerable people who sometimes have to choose between paying for utilities or groceries.

Our platforms serve millions of users a month, process thousands of comparisons a day, and drive hundreds of complex integrations with vastly different partners. We’re a tech- driven business that focuses on agile delivery and cross functional product teams.

We are creating the next generation of comparison platforms, and as we scale we are looking for passionate, empathetic engineers to build highly performant, accessible, and beautiful consumer experiences to facilitate switching and comparisons on the web.

The Acquisition and Retention guild has an extremely exciting opportunity for an experienced people leader to join us. Half of your time you will take the lead as a technical mentor, advising on the best approach to delivering key objectives whilst creating an environment for the talented team to thrive. The other half of your time will be spent supporting the team and working hands-on with your engineering team. Responsible for technical roadmap and accountable for architectural ownership within your team in partnership with principal and distinguished engineers. 

Technologies and experience:

• Experience with Cloud Technologies (we use Azure).  
• Strong experience with software lifecycle management
• Strong experience working within the Microsoft ecosystem
• Experience working in an agile environment 
• Demonstrable experience of coming up with novel ways to solve business problems
• Experience mentoring or leading a team
• Experience setting and owning technical roadmaps

Main Responsibilities:

• Assist coordination and prioritisation of talent to ensure the team is working on the highest-value goals  
• Team motivation, performance, development and standards are actively developed and any improvements sought
• Focus on code reuse before new code creation, working with peers to share best practices, libraries, and other Confused assets

• Support one or more communities of practice and instill the values of these within the engineering team

• Balance improvement and tech debt pay off alongside customer, product, and marketing requirements, ensuring uptime KPIs are maintained
• Support team ceremonies alongside staff engagement and development.  Build strong working relationships with key stakeholders (scrum master, product owner, Head of Engineering etc), keeping a sustainable pace of delivery
• Support one or more communities of practice and instill the values of these within the engineering team.
• Promote a generative culture that fosters accountable autonomy, and safe-to-fail experimentation while balancing reliability, cost-effectiveness, and governance.
  

Key Objectives:

• Demonstrate positive leadership behaviors: the role model for the engineering community and wider organisation

• Monitoring team productivity KPIs tracking to ensure optimal delivery
• Engineers supported and motivated with clear objectives and understanding of further career paths
• Low error rates maintained
• Awareness of the financial consequences of solutions 
• Effective and efficient working relationships with appropriate product owners to ensure aligned guild goals.

Benefits

What we give back to you:

We want to give you a great work environment; contribute back to both your personal and professional development; and give you great benefits to make your time at RVU even more enjoyable. Some of these benefits include:

• Employer matching pension up to 7.5%
• Hybrid approach of in-office and remote working, and a “Work from Home” budget to help contribute towards a great work environment at home
• Excellent maternity, paternity and adoption leave policy, for those key moments in your life
• 25 days holiday (increasing to 30 days) + 2 days “My Time” per year
• Up to 30 days per year “working from anywhere”
• A healthy learning and training budget
• Electric vehicles scheme
• Health insurance
• Access to the Calm and Peppy app for physical and mental health
• Regular events - from team socials to company-wide events with insightful external speakers, we want to make sure our colleagues continue to feel connected