Lead Engineer (Digital Product Team)

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Summary

Are you ready to help lead a dynamic cross-functional team building the future of digital products? We are seeking an exceptional Lead Engineer to join our technical leadership team and champion outstanding, user-centred experiences. You will be one of several Lead Engineers in Digital who work together as a collaborative technical leadership team, each bringing a particular area of specialism. Yours will be UI/UX, accessibility, and front-end performance, and you will lean on your fellow Leads for their specialisms just as they will lean on you for yours.

This role is ideal for a broad, T-shaped engineer who leads from the front and brings real depth in user-facing product engineering. If you are passionate about Digital products, technology, and driving meaningful outcomes for our customers, this is the role for you!

CLUK have ambitious plans to modernise their IT (Information Technology) estate, looking to leverage the cloud and automation at every opportunity and change how we fundamentally deliver solutions, transitioning from a Project to Product approach.

You will work at every stage of the product lifecycle, from discovery and design, through implementation and testing, to operational support, keeping the customer experience at the centre throughout.

Job Purpose

As a Lead Engineer you will have a strong background in full lifecycle software development, and, as the technical leadership team's specialist in user-facing products, you will help set the standard for how we design and build them. You combine hands-on engineering excellence with technical leadership, and you have a particular passion for crafting accessible, high-performing, and genuinely delightful user experiences.

• Designing, building, deploying, and supporting software across front and backend stacks, with particular craft on the front end
• Leading the design and delivery of accessible, responsive, component-oriented user interfaces that meet recognised accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA)
• Championing front-end performance, optimising load and runtime experience and keeping our Core Web Vitals healthy
• Configuring and maintaining automated CI/CD pipelines and test automation to facilitate a seamless route to production for Azure hosted solutions
• Working with your fellow Lead Engineers to set shared technical direction and engineering standards, contributing your UI/UX specialism, and coaching other engineers to raise the bar across the team

Above all you will have a deeply customer-centric mindset: you get close to real users, validate ideas through research and experimentation, and measure success by customer outcomes rather than output. You use data and user feedback to make informed decisions and to ensure our products work brilliantly for everyone.

Duties/Responsibilities

• Work as part of Digital's technical leadership team, a group of Lead Engineers who collaboratively set direction and own our engineering standards, with each Lead bringing a particular area of specialism. You will be our specialist voice on UI/UX, accessibility, and front-end performance, while sharing responsibility for the wider technical agenda alongside your peers. Coach and mentor other engineers, lead by example with hands-on contribution, and help teams make sound architectural and design decisions. Extend your influence beyond your immediate team as an active member of our engineering community.
• Engage fully in the development lifecycle of applications and tools, contributing hands-on from coding to reviewing and releasing to production. Lead the craft of our user interfaces, collaborating closely with designers, product owners, and stakeholders to deliver accessible, performant, and intuitive experiences that customers love.
• Keep customers at the heart of what we build. Get close to real users, use research, usability testing, and experiments to validate hypotheses, and measure the outcomes your work delivers so the team can continuously improve. Make inclusive, accessible design a default so our products work for the widest possible audience.
• Implement and refine DevOps practices, balancing responsibilities between development and operations, while actively reducing technical debt and enhancing the automation and reliability of applications.

Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• You are an expert in building modern, component-oriented front end applications using frameworks and libraries, with a deep appreciation of UX (User eXperience) and genuine craft for user-facing product work.
• You design and build inclusively, with a solid understanding of web accessibility and recognised standards such as WCAG 2.2 AA, and you treat accessibility as a first-class requirement rather than an afterthought.
• You care about front-end performance, optimising load and runtime performance and using measures such as Core Web Vitals to keep experiences fast, smooth, and responsive.
• You are genuinely customer-centric: you seek direct contact with real users, use research, usability testing, and experiments to validate ideas, and measure success through customer outcomes such as adoption, task success, and satisfaction, not just output.
• You have led engineering work through influence: setting technical direction, mentoring and coaching engineers, and raising standards across a team, all while staying hands-on. You are equally comfortable collaborating as one of several technical leaders, sharing ownership and respecting others' areas of specialism.
• Proficiency in a variety of development technologies, languages, design patterns, and tooling. Our current tech stack is primarily Microsoft / Azure focused; solid C# is necessary.
• Advocate of key principles such as SOLID and CLEAN code, applying to all areas of development. Keen to write code that is self-explanatory and easy to maintain.
• We use GitHub Actions and Octopus Deploy for our pipelines, but an understanding of the principles behind CI/CD is more important than the specific tooling you have used. You will have worked in an environment that deploys regularly to production.
• You have a sound grasp of modern engineering principles and prefer working in small iterations that optimise feedback. You like to validate hypotheses via experiments.
• You have an awareness of security principles and best practices to ensure secure software delivery.
• You are committed to continuous learning, staying abreast of evolving industry technologies and trends, and are keen to share, contribute to, and grow our community.
• You have extensive experience working within an agile environment; waterfall projects are a red flag to you.
• You own change all the way to production, and the idea that a different team would test your work, or that it will not rapidly ship to production, does not sit well with you.
• You enjoy working with others and contributing to technical excellence as part of an active community.

Benefits of working at Canada Life

We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benefits package that’s regularly reviewed. As a Canada Life UK colleague, you’ll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including a generous pension and bonus scheme, along with, income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance. We have a fantastic number of other benefits and support services as well as regular personal and professional development.

How we work at Canada Life

Our culture is unique and incredibly important to us. We care about doing the right thing for our people, customers and community and helping others to build better futures. Our blueprint behaviours shape and influence how we work, and are central to the relationships we have with others. Every day we are encouraged to be more curious, own the outcome, face into things together and find a way forward.

We want colleagues to have rewarding careers with us so we invest in the development of our people, technology and workplaces. That’s why we offer a range of training, flexible working and opportunities to grow and develop.

Diversity and inclusion

Building an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce where everyone can feel they belong and achieve their potential regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other characteristic is a key commitment for us. We are proud of the progress we’re making in DEI, and we continue for it to be a significant focus.

“At Canada Life we believe in the power of great people from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives coming together to build better futures. Emerging talent is crucial to our growth and creating an environment that continues to inspire us all.” Nick Harding, Chief People Officer, Canada Life UK

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, including part time, for any of our roles should this be a requirement for you.