Lead Software Engineer

Jet2.com and Jet2holidays are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our high-performance Search team. This is an exciting hands‑on role where you will be responsible for the functionality that powers the customer's first interaction with us, working across a breadth of systems and technologies to deliver value and Create Memories for both our business and our customers. This is a role for a technical leader who loves data and solving complex problems. You won't just be building features; you'll be optimizing the engine that drives our business, ensuring that when a customer dreams of a holiday, we find it for them instantly and accurately. As our Lead Software Engineer, you’ll have access to a wide range of benefits including: Colleague discounts on Jet2.com flights and Jet2holidays packagesAccess to a generous discretionary profit share scheme What you'll be doing: As our Lead Software Engineer, you will be leading a fast‑paced scrum team, made up of a lead engineer, software engineers, automation and manual test engineers, product owners and business analysts. You will also: Design and code low-latency search algorithms and data structures in the core search applications, explicitly optimizing for performance to handle high-concurrency traffic without degrading the customer experience.Creatinga vision for designing and building robust and scalable systems.Makingarchitectural decisions in collaboration with the Architecture Teamfocusing on high-availability, low-latency, and caching strategies to handle massive user load during peak booking periods.Supportingteam activitiesthrough the software development lifecyclesuch as planning and estimation.Line managingand mentoringteam members tofacilitate their growth and progression.Championingcurrent and new coding standards and practices.Drivinga culture of continuous improvement.Improving the developer experience through automation&tooling. You willdrive the implementation of CI/CD pipelines that ensure safety and quality, removing the need for manual intervention in live environments.Implementingobservability and metrics within the search stack. You will ensure the team has visibility into application performance, search accuracy, and error rates tofacilitaterapid debugging and data-driven improvements. What is the tech stack? The search platform has a wide range of technologies including: C#, .NET Core, and Web API.RESTful Microservices – light-weight efficient, decoupled APIs that scale well.Cloud technologies (AWS)Containerised environments using Kubernetes,Dockerand CI/CD pipelines.Automated Testing frameworks with a strong focus on Performance and Load Testing (k6) alongside BDD. What you'll have: Our Lead Software Engineer will have deep technical understanding of Search Engines and caching mechanisms in a high‑traffic e‑commerce environment, be extremely passionate about technology and have some previous line‑management experience. You will also: Have strong written and verbal communication skills and be comfortable communicating and building relationships with stakeholders across the business.Have priortechnicalleadership and mentoring experience and be willing to enhance your skills in this area to support the growth of software development team.Be an excellent role model for the team and colleagues, with an approachable nature and the ability to work as part of a team.Be the point of contact for expert guidance and team support.A mindset focused onDevSecOpsand Automation. You prefer building tools and guardrails over manual processes and have experience creating observable systems.Experience managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and understanding the impact of latency on user behaviour. #J-18808-Ljbffr