Engineering Lead

Hi 👋 we’re Genio. We create beautifully simple learning tools that boost knowledge, skills, and confidence. We’re a SaaS scale up and one of the fastest growing tech companies in the North. There’s 90+ of us around the UK with our HQ in Leeds. Our software is award-winning and used by 100,000s of students at over 1,000 universities & colleges worldwide. We’re growing so we can achieve our mission to support 1 million students to become better learners by 2030. 🚀 About the role Career track: MG4 Unit: Learner Experience As Engineering Lead you'll partner directly with the CPO to drive delivery, engineering standards, and team health as we build Genio's next flagship product. In this fast-paced, early-stage environment, you lead through empowerment rather than doing the work yourself; setting up your Tech Leads for success, fostering a culture of rapid AI-assisted experimentation, and ensuring problems are tackled early. Bringing sharp technical understanding to challenge assumptions and spot risk, you'll balance speed with smart standards to turn product priorities into shipped, learnable product. You will be responsible for: Delivery Leadership: Run delivery for the Learning Experience team, from priority to shipped product. Ensure the team's delivery rhythm and visibility across planning, prioritisation, and release, keeping cycle times short and progress visible. Work with the CPO to translate product priorities and validation goals into sequenced engineering work, provide an honest view of what is achievable within the budget, remove blockers quickly, and ensure engineers are empowered to solve learner problems. Standards and Ways of Working: Bring genuine technical understanding to the team's engineering standards and ways of working, calibrated to a validation-stage product: fast by default, disciplined where it counts. Drive a culture of experimentation and fast feedback, champion AI-assisted engineering across the team, and ensure the team meets non-negotiable security and compliance standards set by Operations. Team Development & Culture: Manage software engineers directly through regular 1-on-1s, development plans, performance management, and honest, timely feedback. Build a culture of collaboration, inclusiveness, trust, and respect. Coach team members on quality, communication, and best practices, address skill gaps, and take an active role in recruitment. Product Partnership: Work closely with the Product Manager (who owns what and why) and Principal Engineer (who owns architecture), while owning the how and ensuring it ships. Bring genuine data proficiency so instrumentation, measurement, and learning are part of every release, and assist in communicating company goals and vision to provide clear direction for the team. Role Outcomes: Fast, dependable delivery: the team ships quickly and predictably, so product hypotheses are tested with real learners at the pace validation demands. A culture of rapid iteration and experimentation: the team defaults to shipping, measuring, and learning, with AI-assisted development used wherever it compounds speed. Standards that fit the stage: quality, security, and engineering discipline are held where they matter, and deliberately lightweight where they don't yet, with trade-offs made consciously. A high-performing, motivated team: engineers are coached, developed, stretched, and supported, with clear expectations and honest feedback. A well-run budget: the team's size, tooling, and spend stay within what has been agreed, and the CPO always has a concrete view of what the current budget can deliver. 👥 Meet the team You will be working most closely with our Chief Product Officer, Principal Engineer (Learning Experience), Tech Leads, Engineers, Senior Data Engineer, Learner Research and Design colleagues, Product Managers, and Principal Platform Engineer (Operations). This role reports directly into the Chief