Software Engineering Manager

Job Description

Job Req ID: 57897

Location: Manchester or Birmingham

About the role

This role is critical to delivering a scalable internal platform that enables engineering teams across BT to build, deploy and operate software efficiently at scale. The Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering leads a team of 8–12 engineers responsible for platform capabilities, developer tooling, and application enablement – directly improving the productivity and experience of thousands of engineers across the business.

By combining strong people leadership with a genuine engineering background, this role ensures platform teams deliver high-quality, reliable, and adoptable platform services – supporting BT’s radical simplification agenda and our path to becoming the UK’s best telco.

What you’ll be doing

Platform Delivery & Engineering

• Manages and coaches teams of platform engineers, driving the engineering organisation’s ability to deliver high-quality platform services on time and within scope
• Oversees technical decisions, tooling choices and platform architecture, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform sustainability
• Contributes hands-on to engineering work including platform services, CI/CD tooling, automation and developer-facing capabilities
• Partners with the Platform Architecture Lead to implement standards, patterns and platform roadmap outcomes
• Monitors and ensures timely, quality releases from teams by driving delivery predictability and compliance with platform engineering standards

People Leadership

• Leads and develops a team of 8–12 engineers through regular 1:1s, structured goal setting and performance reviews
• Manages underperformance proactively with clear improvement plans and career development frameworks
• Builds a high-performing, accountable and psychologically safe engineering culture
• Coaches and mentors engineers into stronger platform practitioners

Delivery & Agile Execution

• Drives Agile delivery practices (Scrum / Kanban) to ensure predictable sprint execution and clear team cadence
• Partners with the Product Owner to prioritise and sequence the platform backlog, aligned to engineering KPIs

Platform Adoption & Enablement

• Ensures platform outputs are usable, consumable and actively adopted by engineering teams
• Reduces developer friction through onboarding improvements and close collaboration with Developer Experience engineers

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Works closely with the Platform Architecture Lead (technical direction), Product Owner (prioritisation), and India Engineering Manager (execution and operations alignment)
• Takes a managerial and influencing role in the platform engineering function, implementing technical vision and driving a culture of continuous improvement

Essential Skills / Experience

• Strong software engineering background with deep cloud engineering experience; proven track record building cloud-native platforms, developer tooling or platform capabilities
• Strong command of Agile delivery practices (Scrum / Kanban) with demonstrable experience owning sprint execution and delivery outcomes
• Proven ability to lead, develop and performance-manage engineering teams in a hands-on engineering management capacity

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Experience in platform engineering or DevOps ecosystems, with familiarity across CI/CD platforms (e.g. GitLab), Kubernetes / container platforms, and Infrastructure as Code (Pulumi / Terraform)
• Experience building or scaling Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and improving developer experience
• Experience working across distributed UK and offshore engineering teams
• Understanding of developer experience and platform enablement models
• Familiarity with observability tooling, platform metrics and SLO / SLA frameworks

Our Package

Tailored benefits make a real difference. That’s why we offer a comprehensive range to support your growth, wellbeing, and everyday life.

You can design the package to suit you and your lifestyle.

Your core benefits include:

• 10% on target annual bonus
• Access to an online private GP 24/7 for you and your immediate family
• Market-leading paid carers leave with up to 2 weeks off
• Equalized maternity, paternity, and adoption leave – 18 weeks’ full pay and 8 weeks’ half pay
• Discounted EE and BT products, including mobile and broadband
• Market leading Pension scheme – 5% from you and 10% from us
• Holiday purchase scheme

You can select additional benefits, including healthcare, dental, gym memberships and more when you’re ready.

Ready to connect for good and help shape the future? Apply now

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.