Engineering Manager - Energy

Company Description

Hi! We're UW. We’re on a mission to take the headache out of utilities by providing them all in one place. One bill for energy, broadband, mobile and insurance and a whole lot of savings!

We’re aiming to double in size as we help more people to stop wasting time and money—big ambitions, to be delivered by people like you.

Got your attention? Read on…

Job Description

We work together. Your team and the people you will work with…

Energy is at the heart of UW, with over 95% of our customers taking at least one Energy service.

We work in small, fully autonomous teams with real ownership of their products.

You will join the Technology & Product function, specifically within the Engineering family. You will co-lead a squad alongside a Product Manager, working in a cross-functional environment with colleagues in UX and Data. Your role is to create clarity, consistency, and momentum within your squad while raising the team's voice to senior leadership. You'll act as a bridge, interacting with stakeholders across the business to provide vital insight and context to your team.

We deliver progress. What you’ll do and how you will make an impact.

As an Engineering Manager at UW you create clarity, consistency, and momentum in your squad. You set direction, ensure high standards in both delivery and quality, and balance short-term goals with long-term sustainability. You invest in people through coaching, feedback, and development, while fostering a positive team culture. You communicate effectively across levels, manage complexity, and continuously grow as a leader in order to enable your teams to do their best work. You will have the following responsibilities:

• Technical Mastery: Take responsibility for the technical decisions the squad makes and ensure they align with company and technical strategy. You have a clear understanding of the engineering practices within the team and identify opportunities for improvement. You understand all of the technologies used by UW in your squad, and how they fit together.

• Impact: Take an integral role in defining team goals and ensuring proposed work is aligned with them. You drive prioritisation within the team to best achieve goals. You push yourself and the team to achieve team goals.

• Operational Excellence: Identify and put in place practices needed to ensure security and operational service level objectives (SLOs) are met. You coordinate with your squad — and others as needed — to ensure organisation-wide on-call coverage. You drive the squad to operational excellence, leading regular metrics reviews to ensure high coverage and performance.

• Planning & Delivery: Work with the Product Manager and team to set objectives and key results (OKRs) that align with company goals. You identify risks and blockers early and work with stakeholders to mitigate them. You measure team performance so that you can continually improve it. You communicate team progress against OKRs, key performance indicators (KPIs) and other milestones to relevant stakeholders. You co-lead annual and quarterly planning for your squad.

• People & Coaching: You ensure the squad is staffed with the technical skillsets to deliver objectives, developing skills within team members and/or hiring as needed. You onboard, train, develop and coach your reports to facilitate their career growth. You participate in performance calibration and promotion reviews for your squad.

• Business & Domain knowledge: Understand and communicate company, department, and pillar strategy and goals to your squad. You interact with stakeholders from across the business in order to provide insight and context to their teams.

• Leadership & Culture: Teach our culture to others and foster a healthy dynamic within your team. You help to resolve interpersonal conflicts and gather, share and act on feedback. You effectively communicate company and department changes to your squad. With help from your manager, you raise the team's voice to senior leadership. You collaborate effectively with cross-functional colleagues, such as UX and data. You co-lead your squad with your squad's Product Manager. You ensure team expenditures (both OpEx and CapEx) are in line with budgets.

Qualifications

We put people first. It’s all about you…

Technical Mastery:

• Knowledge (experience is a bonus) of our core tech stack; gRPC, GraphQL, React, Kafka, Docker & Kubernetes, experience with Go is preferred but not essential.
• Experience leading the team's technical design process, facilitating design discussions and representing the team in cross-functional technical conversations.
• Ability to drive technical decisions to clear, well-documented outcomes by evaluating options, trade-offs, and next steps when the team disagrees.
• Experience validating designs and architecture against real-world edge cases and domain variations to minimise avoidable rework.
• Ability to take ownership of technical decisions, ensuring they align with product and engineering strategy.
• Strong understanding of engineering best practices, proactively identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Hands-on experience with AI development tools; we value engineers who embrace AI in their day-to-day work and see AI-assisted software development as part of the future of engineering

Impact: 

• Experience defining team goals and driving prioritisation to achieve them.
• Experience creating clarity when competing priorities, technical options, or complex legacy system migrations threaten focus or timelines.

Planning & Delivery: 

• Ability to work with Product Managers to set OKRs aligned with company goals. Ability to co-lead annual and quarterly planning.
• Experience identifying risks early and mitigating them. 
• Experience improving delivery predictability by surfacing risks early and cutting or sequencing scope to protect commitments.

Operational Excellence:  

• Experience identifying practices for security and SLOs.
• Ability to drive operational excellence and lead metrics reviews.

People & Coaching:

• Experience of managing a team of engineers.
• Proven ability to onboard, train, develop, and coach reports, as well as. participating in performance calibration and promotion reviews.

Business & Domain Knowledge:

• Intermediate awareness of customer and market insights. 
• Ability to communicate strategy to the squad.
• Experience building deep domain knowledge of the squad’s area, beyond the happy path, including the variations that show up in real customer, partner, and operational scenarios.
• Ability to push back early when requirements or designs are ambiguous or incomplete, so issues are caught before build.
• Experience working within complex, multi-variant domains (such as billing, pricing, identity, or claims) where handling intricate logical edge cases is critical.

Leadership & Culture: 

• Experience fostering a healthy team dynamic and resolving interpersonal conflicts. 
• Ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional colleagues.

Additional Information

So why pick UW?

We’ve got big ambitions so there’s going to be plenty of challenges. There are also a lot of benefits:

• Competitive salary: We benchmark against the industry and will share the salary openly during our first conversation.
• Performance bonus: An annual discretionary bonus ranging from 15-40%.
• Flexible working: We’re a remote-first business. More details can be found here.
• Work-life balance: We offer an optional four-day working week (90% pay for 90% impact).
• Work from anywhere: You can work abroad for up to three weeks, twice every tax year.
• Holiday: 25 days plus bank holidays (increasing with tenure), with the option to trade up to five days each year.
• UW discounts: Save on our services and get a free Cashback Card.
• Future planning: Matched-contribution pension scheme and life assurance (up to 4x salary).
• Family first: Policies designed to help you and your family thrive.
• Flexible benefits: An allowance for private health insurance, dental insurance, or gym membership.
• Sabbaticals: An eight-week paid sabbatical after four years of service.
• Growth: A dedicated learning and development budget and bi-annual promotion cycles.
• Inclusion: Join belonging groups that help shape our culture.
• Events: Company-wide celebrations including the ‘Great Big Get Together’ and our ‘Good Hearted Go-Getter Awards’.

Apply now

You’ve made it this far... hit apply! We can’t wait to hear from you.

Worried you don’t hit every single bit of the criteria? We welcome applications from all backgrounds. If you’re a go-getter with a great heart, get your application in and let’s chat.

Not sure you meet all the requirements? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other underrepresented groups tend not to apply for jobs if they think they may not meet every qualification, when in fact they often do.

We provide equal opportunities, a diverse and inclusive work environment, and fairness for everyone. You are welcome to apply no matter your age, disability, gender, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity status, race, religion or belief, or sexual orientation. Please don’t be afraid to ask about what we can do to support your needs. All requests will be carefully and fairly considered.

Please note, if you are successful and offered a role at UW, you will be subject to a background check. Where checks are unsatisfactory or incomplete and/or a failure to reveal information relating to convictions that you are required to identify as part of the background checks, could lead to withdrawal of an offer of employment.