Engineering Lead

Engineering Lead - Education /Ed-tech sector

Are you looking for an Engineering Lead role in a fast-growing business where people are at the heart of everything we do?

Would you like to work within a socially conscious organisation that is making a real impact in the education sector?

The company 

The Key is the country’s most trusted provider of knowledge and know-how to education leaders determined to make a difference. We provide authoritative, up-to-the-minute sector intelligence, tools, services and resources that give leaders the knowledge to act. 

The role

We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Engineering Lead to join our Engineering team. As an Engineering Lead, you will run one of the product squads building The Key’s compliance suite (part of Key Group, alongside GovernorHub and Robin). It is a player-coach role, combining technical leadership and line management of a small squad of 2–3 engineers. You will

Hands-On Technical Leadership
- Code regularly alongside the squad, setting the quality bar through your own work and code review.
- Own the architecture of the squad’s apps and services, including long-term codebase health and safe operability after launch.

Feasibility & Product Partnership
- Act as the squad’s Tech Lead under the Product Operating Model: a peer in weekly discovery, with feasibility sign-off on product briefs before work enters the sprint board.
- Ship tested working code to main every sprint; launch on the termly cadence.
- Join customer conversations often enough to stay in direct contact with the problem.

People Leadership
- Line-manage the squad: regular 1-2-1s, development plans, and honest performance conversations.
- Build an engaged, sustainable squad culture as part of the engineering leadership group.

AI-Native Engineering
- Work agentic-first as your default mode and drive adoption across the squad.
- Contribute to shared agentic practice across the engineering organisation (skills, tooling, codebase AI-health).

Cross-Squad Collaboration
- Coordinate with the other squad leads, the Staff Engineer, and the Platform and Core squads on shared services and dependencies.
- Consume shared AI services rather than rebuilding them, flagging cross-squad constraints early.