Lead Software Engineer

The Role

Lead Software Engineer

Are you a seasoned Software Engineer with a passion for leadership and driving technical excellence? Do you thrive in an environment that values empowerment, bold transformation, and creativity? Join ITV's Commercial Technology & Change team and help us unlock the power of technology and data to achieve our ambitious commercial goals!

At ITV's Commercial Technology & Change CT&C, we are at the forefront of digitally-enabled transformation for our commercial business. We lead with a vision that advocates empowerment, bold and transformational change, and has creativity at its core. Our core behaviours - Be Effective, Be Optimistic, Be Collaborative, and Be Adaptive - guide everything we do.

We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced Lead Software Engineer to join our dynamic software engineering function. This pivotal, hands-on leadership role will see you guiding a small team of software engineers, technically defining success, and inspiring them to contribute enthusiastically to our shared vision.

The team

CT&C is a key group within ITV's Media & Entertainment business, with several software and data engineering teams responsible for defining and overseeing the operational aspects across our strategic pillars driving innovation with a focus on delivery value to our business. We are committed to building and maintaining efficient delivery capabilities, ensuring the successful execution of projects with a focus on quality and efficiency.

You will be an integral part of a cross-functional team, working closely with product management, UX, Delivery, Data Science, and QA to deliver scalable web and cloud-based applications.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and support for a small team of software engineers, ensuring their productivity, performance, and skills development. You will also support technical recruitment processes.
• Own the system design, development, and maintenance of scalable application features, infrastructure, and functionality within our web and cloud-based applications.
• Lead on a 'you build it you own it' basis, collaborating with customer service and support operations teams to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues by identifying and addressing root causes of service failures. Work closely with product management, UX, and QA teams to refine business requirements and user interface designs, preparing them for development.
• Collaborate with Engineering Leadership to adhere to and promote engineering standards and best practices, including peer code reviews, coding standards, and design pattern adoption.
• Lead front-end development, building and styling web pages with Typescript/JavaScript and React, and ensuring seamless functionality across devices. You will also lead back-end development, including designing and delivering cloud infrastructure and microservice designs, database management, API development, and server management.
• Monitor and optimise your system for high performance and reliability, identifying and resolving bottlenecks and integration challenges.
• Define physical quality characteristics of features and work with the QA team to implement automated quality processes, reporting outcomes through our observability infrastructure. You will also collaborate with architecture, QA, and DevSecOps teams to identify, verify, and resolve non-functional concerns.
• Adhere to architecture governance practices and ensure compliance with ITV data privacy and security regulations, following best DevOps and DevSecOps practices for secure, observable, and operable software in production.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams, documenting feature implementations and technical specifications, and communicating complex solutions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Stay up-to-date with industry trends, identify opportunities for process improvement and automation, and be an active member of ITV guilds to enhance our capabilities.
• Proactively participate in the delivery process by offering to take work, defining technical user stories, managing tickets, updating on progress, and improving our CI/CD delivery approach.

Skills you'll need (minimum criteria)

• Proven experience technically leading a project from inception to production
• At least 3-5 years in a senior software engineering role using modern web technologies
• Strong programming skills in TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Node.js, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Terraform, JSON. Ability to write production-grade code including automated testing
• Knowledge of AWS services and creating a cloud environment via IaC for a microservice architecture (e.g., S3, RDS, AWS infra, Lambda, CloudWatch, EventBridge, Step Functions etc).
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and tools such as Jira and Confluence
• Consistency in approaching development following TDD principles, embracing code quality and tooling (e.g. SonarCloud), and automation-first mindset with CI/CD tooling (e.g. Github Actions)
• Experience with source control systems such as Github, security tools (eg. Snyk)
• Knowledge of building serverless monitoring and debugging tools (eg. Datadog)
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical thinking, and troubleshooting skills for Production Systems

Other things we're looking for (key criteria)

• Knowledge of the UK broadcast industry & broadcast/OTT advertising market.
• Experience in building Machine Learning Services within Operational Applications is a plus
• Knowledge of the UK broadcast and adtech landscape, including CTV and digital marketing (desirable)
• Good understanding of data governance, data privacy, and security principles
• Strong leadership skills; able to mentor and motivate engineering teams
• Curiosity for emerging technologies (e.g. GenAI, MLOps) and how they can be applied
• T-shaped mindset; able to work across disciplines including Product, UX, QA and Support
• Awareness of data governance, privacy, and security principles (desirable)

Closing date: 4th August 2025

Please note, on occasion we may receive a very large volume of applications which means applications for a role may close earlier than the referenced closing date. We'd encourage you to apply as soon as possible if interested.