Tech Lead

Tech Returners Limited; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech consultancy is seeking a Tech Lead for their Manchester/Leeds location. The role involves providing technical guidance, managing stakeholders, and leading teams in agile practices. You’ll work closely with clients to understand their needs and ensure successful project delivery. With a competitive salary range of £55,000 - £70,000, this position offers a hybrid working model and extensive benefits, including 5 weeks of holiday and a digital pension scheme.

Benefits

Hybrid working model

4.5 day working week

5 weeks holiday plus Bank Holidays

Digital pension with employer contribution

Life Assurance

Employee Assistance Programme

Focus on Employee Wellbeing

Modern city centre offices

Optional Private Health Insurance

Qualifications

• Proven commercial experience in leading technical teams within a consultancy setting.
• Comfortable with stakeholder management and outcome delivery.
• Passionate about technical delivery and people development.

Responsibilities

• Identify project goals, critical features, and dependencies.
• Support teams in agile working practices.
• Provide technical architecture direction and maintain quality standards.
• Foster team culture and facilitate client onboarding.

Skills

Technical guidance

Stakeholder management

Agile methodologies

Team leadership

Continuous learning

Job description

Counter - Tech Lead

Department: Counter

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Manchester/Leeds/Hybrid

Reporting To: Technical Director

Compensation: £55,000 - £70,000 / year

Description

Background to the role:

In 2024 Northcoders Group successfully launched a new standalone tech consultancy brand, Counter, in order to challenge the UK tech consultancy space and to provide organisations with a new, high quality and affordable onshore technology partner. Counter assembles and lands teams of highly skilled Counter Consultants for our clients.

Teams are handpicked from our diverse and highly sought after Northcoders and Tech Returners talent pools and mentored to deliver client projects by dedicated Tech Leads. It is the Tech Lead's role to ensure that the Counter Teams are technically and strategically aligned with our client’s mission and up-skilled to deliver within our client’s technology stack, working practices and ceremonies.

At the end of our engagements, clients are able to hire the Consultants as Full Time Members of their team, whilst the Tech Leads return to us to get ready to work on our next client projects.

Counter are now looking for a number of Tech Leads to join our team following a hugely successful first year where we landed a number of high profile clients including HMRC, Skipton Building Society and Manchester Airport Group. If this sounds like rewarding work that you would love to do, then please read on and click apply.

Base Location: Manchester or Leeds - Client's will often require travel and whilst we will focus on clients within a commutable distance you can expect the potential for travelling to the clients office on a form of regular cadence.

The technical lead role is core to the success of every client engagement that the consultancy will operate.

Our tech leads operate in two main capacities. Internally facing aspects, they provide technical guidance and development for their team of engineers - guiding the engineers on best practice and ensuring a focus on maintaining progress of the project.

Externally facing aspects of the project, the tech lead cultivates strong relationships with stakeholders. Through proactive relationship management, the tech lead ensures stakeholder buy-in and alignment throughout the project lifecycle.

You can expect to balance hands-on development work and non-hands on work throughout projects. Typically and 80/20 (20% hands on development work) at the start of a project as much of the discovery and design stages utilise your leadership skills. As projects progress you can expect a balance somewhere in the region of 60/40 (40% hands on development work).

Responsibilities

• Maintenance and advocacy of plan
  • Working with our Technical Director, you will identify what the project is trying to achieve, why things need to change, how they need to change and what critical features need to be delivered for the project to be a success
  • Identifying external dependencies and building up relationships where required
  • Providing structure for estimates and ordering of work
• Advocate for team agile working practices
  • Supporting team in operating in an agile way. Whichever form of agile works for the team, you’ll support them with guiding ceremonies like planning or retrospective actions
• Provide technical architecture direction
  • A good tech lead will seek input from their team and external client teams whilst maintaining accountability for the technical architecture
• Technical expertise
  • Stay on top of the latest approaches, practices and frameworks. Keeping up to date with external sources such as the Tech Radar
  • Ensuring that the project meets the correct, required level of quality
• Team culture
  • You’ll establish and maintain the culture of your team. As an ecosystem, your team will experience various different cultures such as the wider Northcoders organisation culture as well the culture of the client in which the team operates. As such, you will have to consciously work on maintaining the sub-culture of your team whilst integrating with wider organisations.
• End of project client onboarding questions
  • A key part of the offering is that clients can permanently hire the engineers (excluding the tech lead) that delivered their project. As a result, you will need to support answering the questions of the team whilst also working with the client to enable an effective onboarding from consultancy role to full time client role.

About You

As this role is about technical delivery and people development, we are looking for people who love both the technical side and the people side of working in technology. A level of comfort, familiarity and confidence with dealing with different stakeholders and constantly looking to deliver outcomes for your clients.

You have proven commercial experience in the form of leading technical teams ideally within a consultancy scenario, however other team based technical leadership is also considered.

Of equal importance is how you help those progress around you and how you help them progress in their technical understanding, confidence and career development.

You are someone who loves learning about their craft and then loves sharing their knowledge. You keep up to date with the latest tech trends be it through reading blogs, listening to podcasts and ideally through attending events and conferences.

You will take pride in your work and be results focused. As this role is about technical delivery and people development, you are someone that feels at home.

Adding Value: The “Three C’s”

Tech Leads contribute to Counter’s ecosystem in three key areas, known as the “Three C’s”:

Counter

This focuses on the Tech Lead’s impact on Counter as a whole. Examples of value here include:

• Contributing to marketing efforts, such as writing blogs or establishing a voice on social media
• Delivering talks or meetups
• Improving or developing Counter’s internal processes and approaches
• Supporting other Tech Leads or cross-functional projects
• Collaborating with other teams, like Internal Development, or presenting within Counter

Client

When on a project, the Tech Lead has a unique opportunity to create value for the client. Evidence of impact includes:

• Receiving positive, unsolicited client feedback on the project
• Regular client feedback surveys every two months

Consultant

This area highlights the Tech Lead’s influence on the consultants within their team. Counter encourages clients to consider full-time roles for consultants (excluding the Tech Lead). While the Tech Lead cannot directly control hiring decisions, they play a key role in supporting consultants’ development, ensuring they’re in a stronger professional position at the end of the engagement, whether with the client or elsewhere. Evidence of impact here includes:

• Positive feedback in consultant surveys
• Client feedback that mentions consultants by name

Benefits

• Hybrid working model
• 4.5 day working week
• 5 weeks holiday plus Bank Holidays
• Enhanced family friendly policies
• Digital pension with a good employer contribution
• Life Assurance 3x annual salary
• Employee Assistance Programme with access to digital GP appointments and Mental Health Support
• Focus on Employee Wellbeing
• Modern city centre offices (Manchester/Leeds)
• Free refreshments and fruit in all offices
• Optional Private Health Insurance
• Option to purchase extra holidays
• Optional Medical Cash Back Plan
• Optional membership to a Credit Union