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Leadership Track

Engineering Manager

SFIA 5-6
GE → JSE → ISE → SSE →
TTL → EM
LSE → Arch
→ HoE → VP

Shapes the health, performance, and culture of engineering across value streams - leading through technical leaders rather than managing engineers directly.

Overview

As an Engineering Manager (EM), you play a critical role in shaping the health, performance, and culture of engineering across your value streams. You are a member of the Value Stream Leadership Team, partnering closely with Product and Delivery to ensure technical excellence is achieved across engineering disciplines, processes, and practices.

You lead through your Technical Team Leaders (TTLs), empowering them to own the day-to-day technical leadership of their teams - managing the system, not just directly managing individuals. Your focus is on developing technical leaders of people, ensuring the organisation continuously evolves to meet its goals.

You operate at SFIA levels 5 and 6, influencing and leading peers, with most of your accountabilities in the domains of people, practice, and organisational performance rather than direct technical delivery.

Key Responsibilities

Empowerment and Enablement

  • Lead TTLs to create an environment where engineers feel trusted, empowered, and accountable for their outcomes.
  • Support TTLs with all the resources, tools, and coaching they need to develop their teams effectively.
  • Foster a culture of autonomy and mastery, balancing empowerment with alignment to business and technical practices.
  • Ensure that engineers at all levels have clarity on expectations, the support to meet them, and the space to grow.

Value Stream Leadership and Alignment

  • Operate as an active member of the Value Stream Leadership Team, collaborating with Product and Delivery leadership to align on plans, priorities, and organisational strategy.
  • Translate strategic goals into clear engineering intentions, ensuring each team understands how their work connects to wider outcomes.
  • Influence engineering strategy and direction, representing engineering perspective in cross-functional forums.
  • Manage and resolve dependencies, escalations, and systemic blockers that span multiple teams or domains.

Focus on Empirical Work

  • Help teams identify and focus on the most critical activities that drive value for the organisation, while minimising unnecessary work.
  • Champion a culture of prioritisation and effectiveness, where time and resources are allocated wisely to maximise productivity and impact.
  • Ensure decisions are grounded in evidence and data, not assumption or inertia.

Performance Management and Development

  • Drive inclusive performance management processes, including regular feedback, goal setting, and performance evaluations.
  • Support the growth of your TTLs and engineers, celebrating achievement while addressing performance issues constructively and promptly.
  • Build individual development plans that connect personal ambition to organisational capability needs.
  • Identify talent across the engineering community and create pathways for progression and growth.

Collaboration and Team Dynamics

  • Foster a collaborative environment, promoting shared learning, healthy team dynamics, and strong cross-team relationships.
  • Build cohesive teams by modelling inclusive leadership and ensuring psychological safety and a sense of belonging across the engineering community.
  • Partner with other EMs and functional leads to resolve systemic issues that affect multiple teams.
  • Model and reinforce the behaviours and culture you expect to see in your teams.

Continuous Improvement and Learning

  • Encourage a mindset of continuous improvement and learning, seeking opportunities to evolve how engineering is practised.
  • Foster a culture where creativity and experimentation are encouraged to drive innovation and better outcomes.
  • Stay informed about industry trends, emerging technologies, and evolving best practices, and inspire teams to embrace change and adapt.
Role Specific

Practice Leadership

Own and drive the engineering practice within your value stream - setting expectations, raising standards, and ensuring practices are applied consistently across teams.

People Leadership

Develop TTLs as the primary leaders of their teams, providing coaching, mentoring, and a clear accountability framework. You lead leaders, not individual engineers directly.

Delivery Oversight

Accountable for ensuring teams deliver at pace, with quality, and in alignment with business goals. You own the delivery health of your value stream, not the day-to-day sprint.

Org Design and Capacity

Align delivery capacity with strategic priorities - shaping team structures, skill mix, and headcount decisions in response to changing demand and organisational needs.

Cross-Functional Capability

Maintain cross-functional capability by making informed decisions on roles, skills, and collaboration patterns, ensuring engineering functions effectively alongside Product and Delivery.

Change Leadership

Lead teams through change with clarity and conviction - whether organisational restructuring, new ways of working, or significant technical shifts.

Community Building

Create a collective identity across your engineering community - fostering knowledge sharing, high standards, and genuine pride in craft.

Coaching Leaders

Develop technical team leaders and emerging managers, providing feedback, stretch opportunities, and the mentorship that builds the next generation of engineering leadership.

Behaviours

Leadership

  • Enables growth in others - empowering technical and people leaders to own their domains with confidence.
  • Builds high-performing engineering systems, not just individual high-performing teams.
  • Applies critical and strategic thinking to connect local decisions to wider organisational impact.
  • Holds individuals accountable for quality and outcomes through clear ownership and honest feedback.
  • Embeds accountability, integrity, and psychological safety as non-negotiable cultural expectations.
  • Sets direction clearly and revisits it deliberately - the team always understands where they are headed and why.
  • Leads through ambiguity without projecting uncertainty - provides stability and purpose when the path is unclear.
  • Builds a leadership culture within the value stream where TTLs are genuinely empowered, not just delegated to.

Management

  • Manages the system, not the individuals - shapes structures, processes, and rhythms that enable teams to perform.
  • Delegates effectively through TTLs, trusting them to lead while remaining available as an escalation point.
  • Balances situational decision-making - knowing when to coach, when to direct, and when to step back.
  • Partners with Product and Delivery stakeholders to balance innovation, risk, and sustainable pace.
  • Communicates crisply and efficiently about business, technical, and delivery context.
  • Operates with appropriate span of control - does not over-index on any single team or individual at the expense of the whole value stream.
  • Makes resourcing and prioritisation decisions based on evidence and strategic need, not loudest voice or recency bias.
  • Creates and maintains the organisational conditions for high performance - structures, rituals, and norms that scale beyond any individual.

Growing Others

  • Invests consistently in the development of TTLs and engineers, creating clear growth pathways and meaningful development conversations.
  • Treats succession planning as a primary responsibility, not an afterthought.
  • Identifies and addresses skill deficiencies proactively, before they become blockers.
  • Recognises and celebrates excellence - reinforcing learning, improvement, and high standards.
  • Identifies informal leaders and creates opportunities for them to grow their influence.
  • Models curiosity and a growth mindset, demonstrating that continuous improvement starts with self.
  • Uses SFIA or equivalent frameworks purposefully in development conversations - connects capability to role expectations and progression criteria.
  • Creates the conditions for TTLs to stretch - assigns challenges that build leadership muscle, not just technical competence.

Delivery

  • Executes through systems and teams, not micromanagement.
  • Drives systemic improvements across teams, reducing friction and increasing engineering throughput.
  • Promotes continuous flow by minimising unnecessary handoffs and context switching.
  • Champions reliability and resilience - embedding production readiness standards into how teams work.
  • Balances the tension between innovation and stability, keeping long-term sustainability in view.
  • Maintains visibility of delivery health across all teams without creating reporting theatre or performative process.
  • Intervenes at the system level when delivery is at risk - does not simply absorb pressure and pass it down.
  • Holds quality and pace in balance across the value stream, resisting short-term pressure to compromise long-term standards.

Emotional Intelligence

  • Creates a psychologically safe environment where engineers can speak up, take risks, and be themselves.
  • Demonstrates empathy as a core leadership skill, modelling emotional intelligence in all interactions.
  • Navigates challenging conversations with care, directness, and respect.
  • De-conflicts constructively and proactively - preserving working relationships and team trust.
  • Maintains perspective under pressure, projecting calm and confidence even in difficult periods.
  • Recognises the emotional load carried by TTLs and creates space for honest, supported dialogue about it.
  • Reads the room accurately - attuned to shifts in team morale, energy, and trust, and responds before problems become crises.
  • Manages their own emotional state visibly and well - models the self-regulation they expect from their leaders.

Business Acumen

  • Manages budgets and resources responsibly, ensuring engineering investment is proportionate to business impact.
  • Identifies and prioritises engineering investments based on strategic alignment and expected return.
  • Uses key metrics to connect engineering performance to business outcomes and drive data-informed decisions.
  • Builds compelling business cases for engineering investment in a language that resonates with senior stakeholders.
  • Helps engineers understand how their work contributes to organisational goals, building commercial awareness across the team.
  • Understands the cost of delay, technical debt, and unplanned work in financial as well as technical terms.
  • Contributes meaningfully to headcount and capacity planning conversations - brings evidence, not just instinct.
  • Tracks and communicates the return on engineering investment in terms that product, commercial, and finance colleagues can act on.

Communication

  • Coaches managers and leaders on effective communication - helping them find their voice and develop their impact.
  • Acts as a bridge between engineering, Product, and Delivery - translating technical context into business language and vice versa.
  • Communicates team progress, risks, and challenges with clarity and without unnecessary noise.
  • Presents recommendations to senior leaders concisely and with appropriate evidence.
  • Maintains transparency and composure during high-pressure situations - modelling the communication standards you expect from your teams.
  • Negotiates effectively with internal and external stakeholders, representing engineering interests without compromising relationships.
  • Creates the conditions for honest upward feedback - actively seeks signals from TTLs and engineers rather than waiting for escalations.
  • Tailors communication to the audience and moment - knows when to provide detail, when to summarise, and when to simply listen.
Skills
Strong coaching and communications skills - able to influence effectively across multiple levels from TTLs through to senior leadership.
Deep understanding of engineering practices, enabling informed guidance on technical direction without needing to operate at the code level.
Demonstrated ability to lead and develop technical team leaders, building leadership capability at scale.
Ability to build leadership capacity - shaping opinions, developing talent, and defining continuous improvement objectives.
Experience with SFIA or equivalent skills frameworks, using them to structure development conversations and career pathways.
Competency in performance management processes - from regular feedback cycles through to formal PIPs and promotion decisions.
Commercial awareness - able to engage credibly with budget, capacity planning, and business case conversations.
Broad organisational design awareness - able to shape team structures and working models in response to changing context.