Lead Software Engineer (Java/AWS)

Location: Manchester, United Kingdom; hybrid with in-office presence twice a week

Company

hirify.global is a European media business delivering publishing, radio, podcast, audio broadcasting, and entertainment content to millions of people across nine markets.

What you will do

• Lead a software engineering squad while contributing hands-on through code writing, code reviews, and technical decision-making.
• Support engineers’ development through 1:1s, performance reviews, growth plans, and mentoring of junior and mid-level engineers.
• Guide architecture, service boundaries, domain-driven design, and event-driven communication within the squad.
• Plan squad capacity, contribute to roadmaps and sprint planning, and manage delivery risks, dependencies, and technical debt.
• Maintain engineering standards across testing, CI/CD, containerisation, version control, observability, and security.
• Participate in in-hours and out-of-hours incident rotas and support a “you build it, you run it” DevOps culture.

Requirements

• Solid hands-on software engineering experience across frontend and backend development.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a product-led, multidisciplinary organisation with consistent delivery.
• Ability to work across Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, TypeScript, and React, with deep expertise in some areas.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, domain-driven design, service boundaries, and event-driven systems.
• Experience with modern engineering practices, including CI/CD, testing, code review, observability, containerisation, and secure development.
• Structured planning, stakeholder communication, escalation management, Agile delivery, and a servant-leadership mindset.

Nice to have

• Scrum experience.
• Media, audio streaming, or consumer platform experience.
• Interest in AI-assisted development tooling and awareness of AI trends in engineering.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, product-led environment organised around small engineering squads.
• Focus on empathy, accountability, inclusion, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
• 28 days of holiday, bank holidays, and two volunteer days.
• Access to Bauer Academy internal training and leadership development support.
• Enhanced maternity, adoption, paternity, and shared parental leave pay.
• Flexible working and collaboratively scheduled incident-management rotas.

Hiring process

• The recruitment process is designed to be inclusive and accessible, with reasonable adjustments available on request.