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Engineering Technical Lead
The FA
The Football Association is the governing body of association football in England and the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.
Job Posted- 13 Aug 2025
Status- Full Time
Location- England
Closing date- 24 Aug 2025
As an Engineering Technical Lead at the FA, you will be responsible for leading the software engineers within your Pod (Team/Value stream). You will be key in ensuring your Pod builds the right thing in the right way. This is a technical leadership role responsible for the end-to-end development of a suite of FA applications. Working primarily within a Microsoft-based technology stack, the role serves as the central point for all development activities. Key responsibilities include establishing coding standards, implementing quality assurance processes, and overseeing the work of developers. The ideal candidate will wear multiple hats—acting as an architect, delivery manager, engineer, quality assurance, mentor, problem solver, and collaborative team member—ensuring both technical excellence and alignment with business goals.
What will you be doing?
- Collaborate with solution architects, application architects and data engineers to develop solutions meeting delivery goals.
- Identifying and capturing work that needs to be done, including dependencies external to the team.
- Responsible for onboarding new team members, and managing the impact of any leavers.
- Being across the health of the team. Is everyone contributing? Is everyone growing? Does the team operate in psychological safety?
- Lead and develop a high-performing, cross-functional team, fostering collaboration, shared success, and continuous growth through mentoring and coaching.
- Establish, uphold and champion team norms and engineering standards, promoting a culture of accountability and excellence.
- Contribute to technical discussions and architecture decisions, leveraging your software engineering expertise to guide quality and scalability.
- Support agile delivery practices and ceremonies, and continuous improvement through feedback and best practices.
- Enable robust DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipeline management and Kubernetes deployments.
- Promote a data-driven culture, helping the team define and track key performance and delivery metrics.
- Drive innovation and continuous improvement, encouraging experimentation and adapting processes to enhance efficiency.
- Collaborate with stakeholders to align on priorities, maintain a clear technical roadmap, and ensure transparency across technical and non-technical teams.
- Monitor and review changes to existing code base on a regular basis to ensure quality and robustness of software solutions ensuring compliance with FA development standards and processes.
- Optimise the developer experience to make the development process easier and help the team to become more productive.
- Ensure that production application services and applications are monitored and observed proactively – spotting potential issues early.
- Continuously stretch engineers with meaningful challenges and provide honest, constructive feedback to accelerate their development.
- Monitor and assess the capability and skill sets of developers within your team, highlighting any training and development requirements (both internal and external third-party developers).
- Assist Product Owners to break down requirements into specific programming tasks and provide estimates where required.
- Communicate delivery progress, timelines, and impact of changes clearly to Delivery Manager.
- Ensure the quality of the product is built into the whole development lifecycle, and not an afterthought for the QA engineers.
- Encourage the delivery team to adhere to agile development methodologies, practicing Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, and advocating paired programming.
- Ensure that user stories flow efficiently through the workflow and support the team in the identification and removal of impediments.
- Keep abreast of the latest developments in technology and demonstrate proactive engagement with developer communities.
- Actively contribute to the wider FA engineering community of practice.
- Comply with all company policies and procedures to ensure that the highest standards of health, safety, and well-being can be maintained.
What are we looking for?
Essential for the role:
TECHNICAL & EXPERIENCE
- Development experience using C# (.NET Core), ASP.NET, JavaScript, T-SQL.
- Experience designing, developing and maintaining MS SQL Server relational databases with change tracking / CDC.
- Experience with Dependency Injection & IoC frameworks.
- Experience with ORM Frameworks: Entity Framework, Dapper.
- Experience in building and consuming web services using micro-services architecture using REST APIs.
- Experience in keeping multiple applications in synch – real time/batch processing.
- Experience of leading teams of technical specialists through to successful delivery.
- Experience of providing technical leadership and oversight with offshore and/or third-party delivery teams.
- Experience with unit testing, TDD and BDD.
- Experience with working with SAST (Static Application Security Testing) and SCA (Software Composition Analysis) tools e.g. Sonar.
- Experience with design and development of n-tier architectures.
- Knowledge of common software design patterns.
- Working knowledge of Agile/Scrum.
DELIVERY PLANNING
- Experience of agile estimating techniques – from large initiatives to user stories.
- Working with delivery management and product disciplines to produce quarterly plans and longer-term roadmaps.
Beneficial to have:
- Technical educational background.
- Microsoft Software Development Certifications.
- Experience developing and supporting high-volume public-facing web applications.
- Experience of using Sitecore.
- Mobile apps development.
- Typescript, Angular, React/Vue frameworks.
- Message-based integration – Azure Service bus.
- Working with Azure Data Factory.
- Experience of working in a Sport related environment.
What's in it for you?
We are committed to ensuring everyone can flourish in their roles, to achieve this we have unique office spaces under the arch of the iconic Wembley National Stadium, which is the home of English Football. We are also delighted to offer a world-class, Elite Performance Centre, St. George's Park in Staffordshire which is an exceptional setting to develop and inspire high-performing England teams and leaders.
We pride ourselves in offering a competitive salary as well as great opportunities to develop and grow in your role. But that is not all; we also have a range of exciting benefits, some of which can be found below:
- Access to event day tickets at Wembley Stadium, alongside a host of regular internal events throughout the season, encouraging you to connect and learn with your colleagues and look after your mental health and well-being.
- Free, nutritious lunches at Wembley Stadium and St. George's Park.
- Free private medical cover.
- A contributory pension scheme.
- An additional 'Thank You' days leave, volunteering days as well as 25 days annual leave (based on a full-time, permanent contract.)
- A hybrid working model which offers greater flexibility.
How to Apply
Please click “Apply Now” to begin your application.