Engineering Lead - Document Management (East Coast, Remote)

About IRIS

IRIS Software Group is one of the UK's largest privately held software companies, trusted by 100,000+ businesses, schools and accountancy firms to keep their operations running. Our software pays 1 in 6 UK employees, supports over 12,000 schools, and is relied on by 91 of the top 100 UK accountancy firms.

We're a Great Place to Work® certified employer, recognised for our commitment to well-being, inclusion and development - and we're growing fast.

Role Purpose

This is a hands-on leadership role combining technical direction, agile delivery ownership and people management for one autonomous team building and maintaining document capture, storage, workflow and retrieval capabilities embedded in our accountancy product suite. Approximately 40% delivery, 40% technical, 20% people.

Main Responsibilities

Delivery Management (40%)

• Scope, sequence and deliver against quarterly OKRs, with commitments the team can actually meet and few surprises along the way

• Own stakeholder communication on progress, risk and dependencies across Product, Compliance and leadership

• Raise release cadence and predictability - our direction of travel is a production deployment every sprint, moving towards on demand

• Balance workload and staffing across the team to keep delivery sustainable

Technical Leadership & Contribution (40%)

• Own architecture and technical decisions for document ingestion, storage, retrieval and integration at scale

• Set and enforce security standards for sensitive client and financial data: encryption in transit and at rest, access control, retention and audit trail

• Drive engineering quality - automated testing, code review standards, CI/CD and observability - and hold the line on it under delivery pressure

• Manage technical debt deliberately: a prioritised, funded plan rather than a backlog nobody reads

• Adopt AI tooling into the team’s engineering workflow responsibly, and measure whether it is genuinely helping

People Management (20%)

• Line manage engineers: 1:1s, performance reviews, career development, and the difficult conversations when they are needed

• Grow senior engineers into technical leaders and delegate real accountability to them

• Own team health and engagement - act on it rather than simply reporting it

Key Relationships

Internal: Document Management and Platform engineering teams, Accountancy Product Management, Compliance and Security, QA, DevOps. External: offshore engineering partners, Professional Services, Customer Support, third-party vendors. Leadership: Associate Director of Engineering, VP Engineering, Product leadership.

Success in the First Twelve Months

• Delivery: predictable sprint outcomes, minimal carry-over, release cadence improved to the agreed target

• Quality: change failure rate and escaped defects trending down; no critical or high severity vulnerabilities carried in production

• Technical health: agreed modernisation milestones delivered alongside roadmap commitments

• Team: every engineer with a clear development plan, low unplanned attrition, and at least one named successor for key roles

2. Qualifications & Experience

Technical Skills

• Depth in .NET and C# with ASP.NET Core Web APIs and distributed systems, plus working fluency in a modern UI framework (React, Angular, Vue or Blazor)

• Production cloud experience with containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines you have personally built or owned - Azure preferred, as our platform runs entirely on Azure, though strong AWS experience transfers well

• Sound judgement across relational and non-relational data stores, and the reasoning to choose between them

• Application security in practice: vulnerability management, threat modelling and dependency hygiene

• Observability that is actually used, and production support experience under real incident pressure - Datadog preferred, Application Insights also welcome

Experience

• Evidence of shipping through a team: 6+ years in software engineering, plus either formal line management or sustained technical leadership of a delivery team

• Track record delivering complex projects in an Agile environment, balancing technical excellence against delivery timelines

• Experience modernising established codebases without stopping delivery

• Effective working across distributed and offshore teams in different timezones

Desirable

• Document, content or records management systems, including OCR and search or indexing pipelines

• Regulated or audit-heavy domains - finance, legal, govtech - with SOC 2 or equivalent

• Platform or shared-services engineering

• Practical AI integration work, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent tooling

• Advanced Azure certification (or AWS equivalent)

3. Competencies

• Leads several workstreams at pace without letting security or data-integrity discipline slip

• Communicates and negotiates credibly across engineering, Product and Compliance, and upwards to leadership

• Decides with incomplete information, and revisits decisions when the evidence changes

• Balances technical excellence against delivery reality without defaulting to either

• Self-starter who owns outcomes end to end and builds team culture deliberately

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Impact: Your work will influence millions globally.

• Growth: Continuous learning and career development opportunities.

• Belonging: A culture that celebrates diversity and empowers every individual.
  

Ready to Apply?

Click Apply - we’re excited to learn about your unique perspective and experience. If you need adjustments during the process, let us know. We’re committed to making this opportunity accessible to everyone.

What to expect from our hiring process

Our process is designed to be fair, transparent and straightforward. Stages vary depending on the role — more senior positions may involve additional steps, and some areas include role-specific assessments such as a technical test or case study — but typically you can expect:

1. Application review — we assess your experience and potential

2. Initial call — a short conversation to learn about you and share more about the role

3. Skills assessment — tailored to the position, e.g. case study, coding challenge or portfolio review

4. Final interview — meet the team and explore how you'll make an IMPACT at IRIS

We'll always walk you through the specific stages at the start of the process so you can prepare with confidence.

If you need any adjustments or accommodations during the process, let us know, we’re committed to making this experience accessible for everyone.