Senior Engineering Manager

Civica builds software that runs essential public services. Our systems support local government, the NHS, housing associations, and financial institutions: services that millions of people depend on every day. When our software works well, caseworkers make better decisions, clinicians access the right information, and councils deliver services that communities rely on. 

We’re not a startup chasing the next hype cycle. We’re a company with deep roots in the public sector, working on problems that matter, and we’re investing seriously in how we build software to make sure we can keep doing that for the next decade. 

Why we feel you'll like the role of Senior Engineering Manager

You’ll lead a domain of 6–10 teams (roughly 60–90 engineers), manage the Engineering Managers who run those teams day to day, and report to the Director of Engineering. It’s a manager-of-managers role, working alongside Product and commercial leadership as a peer, not just a bigger single team and not a purely internal-facing management job. 

It’s a step up from an Engineering Manager role, not a bigger version of one. An EM owns a team. A Senior EM owns the system of teams: how they’re structured, how work flows between them, how the EMs leading them grow, and how the domain shows up to Product and the wider business. You’ll spend less time in any one team’s backlog and more time on the conditions that let several teams deliver well at once: resourcing, coaching, architectural alignment, and representing engineering credibly outside engineering. 

The domain has real history and real constraints, not a green field: a mix of established and modernising systems, some legacy platforms alongside newer stacks, and teams at different levels of technical and operational maturity. You’ll be expected to form your own view of what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change, and to build the trust needed to act on it. 

You’ll make decisions based on data, and help build a culture of measurement and continuous improvement.

What you’ll be accountable for:

Teams & people
- Coaching and developing the Engineering Managers (and senior/lead engineers) who report to you: their technical judgement, their people leadership, their career growth.
- Structuring and re-structuring teams as the work demands it, closing skill or capacity gaps and avoiding key-person dependencies rather than treating team shape as fixed.
- Holding a consistent, visible bar for what a high-performing team looks like across your domain, and addressing sustained under-performance directly rather than leaving it to individual EMs.
- Building a hiring and retention engine for the domain: enabling your EMs to hire well, and finding growth and mobility paths for strong engineers. 

Delivery
- Being the first line of escalation for delivery and technical issues across your teams, arriving with context and a proposed path forward rather than just the problem.
- Coordinating effort across workstreams and delegating decisions to EMs with clear boundaries, then following through rather than disappearing after handoff.
- Partnering with Product and commercial stakeholders to define shared metrics, challenge scope and trade-offs, and keep teams aligned to a durable mission rather than reactive requests.
- Applying team-topology thinking (Conway’s Law and similar) to keep team boundaries and interaction patterns deliberate rather than accidental.

Technical craft
- Staying close enough to the technical detail to ask good questions and spot drift, without being hands-on: your leverage is through your EMs and senior engineers, not your own commits.
- Protecting space for quality against deadline pressure, and coaching your EMs to do the same with their teams.
- Driving the domain’s operational maturity (testing, observability, incident response) in partnership with teams rather than mandating from above.
- Building credible cases for structural or technical investment (replatforming, t