Software Engineering Team Lead

Prepare yourself; this ones a novel. Most "Team Lead" job posts are secretly looking for a hero. This one isn't. I've worked with this company for a very long time, so this isn’t just a job I need to fill. Long enough to remember when they were small, everyone wore several hats, and "ownership" meant finding the problem and fixing it yourself. That worked. Actually, it worked very well. They've gone from an ambitious eMobility company to THE name to work for a well-backed European SaaS business, operating across multiple countries, handling the bit nobody sees when they plug in an EV: charging sessions, roaming partners, operators, tariffs, payments, invoicing, and all the data flying between them. Tens of millions of euros move through their platform every single day. They've built something serious. But the company they are today can't keep running like the company they were three years ago. The scale-up chaos did its job. Now comes structure. I'm looking for someone to lead their Transactions team: eight engineers and a Product Owner, owning one of the highest-stakes areas of the platform. This role reports straight into the leadership team. There are good people in there. Some properly strong engineers. The problem was never whether they can solve hard technical problems. It's that too much still needs pushing. The team can be reactive. Ownership needs sharpening. And the Team Lead has historically been dragged into the work instead of being given room to improve how the team operates. Very useful when something's on fire. Less useful when you look up six months later and realise you're still the one holding the extinguisher. The new setup is different. Architecture is already split into its own role. Delivery is being carved out too. Both there to take weight off the Team Lead, not add to it. Your job isn't to collect all three titles and slowly lose the will to live. Your job is to build the team around you: work out who's ready for more, develop the people who aren't there yet, delegate without dumping, make the call when opinions collide, and have the conversations everyone else keeps putting off until next week. What you'll need: a proper software engineering background, so you can hold your own with strong senior engineers even when you're not the one writing the code. Enough experience leading a team that you know what delegation actually looks like, four or five people is plenty, this role will roughly double it. And the communication and people skills to spot a problem in the team before it becomes a fire, and actually deal with it instead of letting it run. Nice to have, not required: C#/.NET, Azure, a background in payments or fintech, time in a smaller consultancy (the stakeholder-management reps tend to show) I think. None of them are dealbreakers. Good engineering doesn't become bad because you learned it on another cloud, and they'd rather hire the right person and get them up to speed on the stack than the other way round. They care far more about whether you can walk into a room of experienced engineers, follow what's being discussed, and ask the one question that changes the conversation. This isn't a rescue mission. The business is successful, the product is proven, the people are very good. This is just the next version: less heroics, clearer ownership, better teams. And a Team Lead who measures their worth by what the team can do without them, not by how much they personally fixed that week. If you've helped a team grow up like that before, properly good, not painfully corporate, I'd really, really like to hear from you.