Lead Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Hybrid, contractually aligned to the Milton Keynes office, with home working and office attendance expected when required, averaging approximately once per month; UK-based role.

Salary: £59,966–£67,468 per year, plus a 20% Market Related Pay Allowance initially until 21 October 2028.

Company

hirify.global provides flexible, part-time and online higher education designed to make learning accessible to people anywhere.

What you will do

• Own one or more digital products or services across discovery, architecture, development, deployment, live operation, evolution and retirement.
• Set technical direction across software, infrastructure, environments, CI/CD, automated testing, security, observability, resilience and operational support.
• Remain hands-on by designing, building, testing, reviewing, deploying and operating maintainable software.
• Partner with Product and Delivery Managers to assess feasibility, estimate work, manage dependencies and address non-functional requirements.
• Lead incident response and reliability improvements using operational evidence and root-cause analysis.
• Coach engineers, contribute to engineering standards and introduce emerging practices, including responsible AI use.

Requirements

• End-to-end technical ownership of a production digital product or service through discovery, delivery and live operation.
• Accountability across architecture, software engineering, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, automated testing, security, observability and resilience.
• Hands-on experience designing solutions, writing and reviewing maintainable code, and influencing implementation quality.
• Experience operating and supporting production services, including incident diagnosis, root-cause improvement and reliability work.
• Experience creating automated tests and safe, repeatable deployment pipelines.
• Experience making pragmatic architectural decisions and managing technical debt, vulnerabilities, obsolescence and lifecycle risk.
• Experience leading technical delivery in a multidisciplinary product team and making evidence-based trade-offs with Product.
• Experience coaching engineers and building collective ownership without becoming a decision-making bottleneck.
• Strong engineering fundamentals, learning agility and experience applying modern engineering practices; experience with every listed technology is not required.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Multidisciplinary, collaborative environment focused on accessibility, security, reliability, iterative delivery and continuous learning.
• Hybrid and flexible working, including family-friendly policies and possible job share, part-time or compressed-hours arrangements.
• 33 days of annual leave plus bank holidays and a three-day Christmas closure.
• USS pension scheme with 14.5% employer contributions and staff fee waivers for OU study through postgraduate Masters level.
• Health and wellbeing support, discounts, development opportunities and transport benefits including electric vehicle, cycle-to-work and season-ticket schemes.

Hiring process

• Two-stage interview process conducted online via Microsoft Teams.
• First stage includes a system design discussion; second stage includes a presentation.
• Application requires a CV, a personal statement of up to 1,000 words and additional online application questions.