Lead Software Engineer (SC Cleared)

Lead Software Engineer (SC Cleared) - Contract - Hybrid working/London - £competitive

Synergize Consulting are now hiring for a Lead Software Engineer to work at a leading consultancy client on a contract basis.

The successful candidate will lead an engineering team, driving the development of innovative, secure and scalable AI-enabled services and capabilities.

This is an exciting opportunity for an engineering leader who combines strong technical expertise with a passion for developing people and building high-performing teams. You will be responsible for leading engineering activities, managing software delivery, providing technical direction and supporting the professional development of engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and coordinate the activities of the specific engineering team, ensuring effective delivery and adherence to appropriate engineering methods and standards.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance, supporting software design and making hands-on contributions to development when required.
• Line manage, coach and develop engineers, supporting their continuing professional development, performance management and career progression.
• Lead recruitment activities and oversee the onboarding and offboarding of technical staff.
• Maintain team skills matrices, professional role descriptions and workforce plans to support capability development and future resource requirements.
• Review technical designs and documentation, providing technical approvals and undertaking engineering assurance within your area of responsibility.
• Promote high standards of software engineering, quality management, testing and secure development practices.
• Support the development of AI-enabled applications and services, including large language model (LLM) integration, model evaluation, identity and access management, agentic tooling and observability.
• Work collaboratively with architecture, cyber security, FinOps and platform teams to ensure services are secure, scalable, resilient and supportable.
• Support live-service assurance, operational activities and incident response when required.
• Encourage innovation, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement across the engineering team.

Essential skills and experience

We are looking for candidates who can demonstrate:

• Proven experience leading engineering teams and managing software delivery, including selecting appropriate development methods and working with senior technical and delivery colleagues.
• Experience of line management, coaching and developing engineers, managing performance and supporting continuing professional development.
• Experience of recruitment and workforce management, including onboarding and offboarding, maintaining skills matrices and developing workforce plans.
• Strong software design experience, including reviewing technical documentation, providing technical approvals and undertaking engineering assurance.
• Hands-on software development experience using a modern programming language such as Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Java or Go.
• Experience designing and developing secure APIs, integrations and Back End services.
• Practical experience building AI-enabled applications, platforms or services, with an understanding of LLM integration and evaluation.
• Experience delivering solutions using AWS or a comparable public cloud environment
• Cloudflare AI Gateway or comparable LLM gateway and control-plane technologies.
• AWS Bedrock and integrating multiple foundation model providers.
• Building AI agents, tool-using systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations or multi-step agentic workflows.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings, vector search and enterprise knowledge integration.
• Due to the nature of the client, it would be an advantage for candidates to hold, or be eligible and willing to undergo, a certain level of security clearance (SC).

If you are looking to take the next exciting step in your IT career, please send in your CV for immediate consideration.