Engineering Lead

We’re looking for people to join the Access family, who share our passion for believing in better, and who will help us continue to grow.

Love Work. Love Life. Be You. - is central to our success and how we give our customers the freedom to do more of what's important to them.

What does Access offer you? 

We offer a blended approach to office working, encouraging you to collaborate and connect in one of our thriving offices. We deliver on what we say, taking the development of our people seriously. We’ll work with you to progress your success plan and provide opportunities to accelerate your career. 

Position Summary

The Lead Software Engineer is a ‘50:50’ role. Half the time you are in the code — shipping production software, holding the technical bar and setting the standard the team follows. The other half you are leading the people, the process and the architecture — running a high-performing engineering stream and developing the engineers within it.

You’ll be joining a small, value-aligned structure: up to two streams of four engineers each, with Product cover per stream. QA is owned by engineering — there is no handoff to a separate team, and that is by design.

The F&B Software Company sits within Access Hospitality, with engineering teams distributed globally, and powers many millions of guest experiences every day. The portfolio includes ResDiary, Dish Cult, DesignMyNight, Collins, Tonic, Soda, Wireless Social, Paytronix, Paytronix Online Ordering, QikServe Digital Ordering, Kiosk, QikServe Connect, Access EPOS, Newbridge POS, GuestPOS, Acteol, Trail, Maintain, RotaReady and CPL.

AI augmentation is a pre-requisite for this role, not an optional extra. Access has invested in cutting-edge AI tooling and we expect every engineer and leader to use AI pervasively to accelerate outcomes, raise quality, and shorten feedback loops. Lead Software Engineers are expected to model this behaviour, embed it into team standards and hold the bar for AI adoption across their streams. If you are not already working this way, you will need to get there fast.

Technical Leadership

• Spend approximately half your time as a hands-on engineer: writing, reviewing and shipping production code to the same standard you hold your team to.
• Own the technical direction of your stream — architecture decisions, technology choices, design patterns and code standards.
• Set and maintain the engineering quality bar: code review standards, test coverage expectations, CI/CD discipline, observability and security practice.
• Identify and address technical debt proactively, balancing pragmatism with the long-term health of the codebase.
• Contribute to platform-wide architectural decisions, feeding your stream’s experience and evidence back into broader engineering strategy.

People Leadership

• Own the performance, development and wellbeing of up to eight engineers across your streams.
• Run regular 1:1s, set clear goals, and give direct, actionable feedback — both positive and developmental.
• Manage the full performance cycle for your engineers: goal setting, mid-year reviews, end-of-year assessments and, where necessary, performance improvement plans.
• Identify growth opportunities for each engineer and actively create the conditions for them to progress.
• Hire well — contribute to recruitment, assess candidates rigorously, and take accountability for the quality of who joins your team.
• Model the behaviours and working practices you expect from the team, including AI adoption, communication standards and engineering discipline.

Delivery & Process

• Keep your streams delivering consistently — predictable throughput, low change failure rate, fast recovery when things go wrong.
• Own the engineering process within your streams: sprint ceremonies, planning quality, backlog health and cross-team dependency management.
• Work closely with Product to balance feature delivery against technical investment, making the trade-offs visible and explicit rather than absorbed silently.
• Remove blockers for your engineers — escalate where needed, resolve where you can, and protect the team’s ability to focus.
• Ensure incidents are handled well: fast triage, clear communication, thorough post-mortems, and unique failures — the same class of incident should not recur.

Technical

• Software owned by your streams meets reliability, latency and availability targets in production.
• Lead time for change trends downwards; deployment frequency trends upwards across your streams.
• Change failure rate stays under 15%; MTTR trends downwards.
• Critical and high security vulnerabilities patched within agreed SLAs (1 day / 14 days).
• AI tooling is a demonstrable, routine part of your workflow and embedded visibly in team standards.

People

• Engineers in your streams have clear goals, regular feedback and a development plan they understand.
• Regrettable attrition is low; engineers in your streams are growing and progressing.
• Performance issues are identified early and managed directly, without escalation becoming the default.
• New hires reach productive contribution within an agreed onboarding window.

Delivery

• Your streams deliver predictably against commitments made to Product and stakeholders.
• Failures are unique — the same defect or incident class does not recur.
• Technical debt is visible, prioritised and moving in the right direction.

How We Work

Before the tech stack, this is what working in the F&B engineering team looks like. As a Lead Software Engineer you are expected to model these standards, not just meet them.

• AI tooling is your default starting point, not a fallback — Copilot, Claude Code, Devin, Cursor or equivalent are open before you write the first line.
• You use AI pervasively across the full development lifecycle: generating and reviewing code, writing tests, producing documentation, triaging incidents and researching unfamiliar domains.
• You can prompt effectively — you know how to get useful output, iterate on it, and critically evaluate what comes back rather than accepting it at face value.
• You treat AI-generated code with the same scrutiny as code from a colleague — it gets reviewed, tested and owned by you.
• You actively embed AI working practices into your team — through standards, playbooks, code review culture and leading by example.
• You improve your AI working practices continuously and bring the team with you; this field moves fast and standing still is falling behind.
• Expect your interview process to include assessment on how you work with AI tooling — not just what you know without it. Come prepared to demonstrate your workflow, not just talk about it.

Technical Foundation

The fundamentals are non-negotiable — your technical credibility is what earns the trust of your engineers.

• Strong commercial software engineering background with a track record of shipping production systems end-to-end.
• Clean code, automated testing and CI/CD discipline — you set the standard, which means you have to embody it.
• Comfortable across the stack — backend, frontend or full-stack — able to review and contribute across the breadth of what your streams own.
• Solid SQL and relational database skills; experience with cloud-hosted databases in production.
• Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs and/or event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes or equivalent).
• Experience making and communicating architectural decisions, including the trade-offs involved.

Leadership & People

• Proven experience leading a software engineering team — setting direction, managing performance and developing engineers.
• Direct, honest and constructive communicator — comfortable giving difficult feedback and having conversations that matter.
• Able to manage competing priorities across engineering and people responsibilities without dropping either.
• Experience running engineering process — agile delivery, planning, retrospectives, incident management.
• Comfortable working asynchronously across distributed teams (UK and India).

Technologies

Access F&B runs a broad and evolving tech stack. We care far more about solid fundamentals and the ability to learn than exact technology match.

• Java — present across several F&B product areas.
• TypeScript / React — frontend and web-based ordering and management interfaces.
• Azure — our primary cloud platform; experience with Azure-native services (App Service, Service Bus, SQL, AKS, Key Vault) is valuable.
• AWS — also present across parts of the F&B portfolio.

Security & Compliance

• Working knowledge of security fundamentals: auth and authorisation patterns, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit, and PII handling.
• Awareness of GDPR and UK GDPR as they apply to software systems handling guest and payment data.

What are we all about? 

The Access Group is one of the largest UK-headquartered business management software providers. It provides solutions that empower more than 160,000 small and mid-sized organisations in commercial and non-profit sectors across Europe, USA and APAC, giving every employee the freedom to do more of what's important. Its innovative cloud solutions and integrated AI software experience across multiple Access products transform how business technology is used.

With over 9,300 talented individuals driving innovation and customer excellence, we’re shaping the future of work. And we want you to be part of it. At Access, people are at the heart of everything we do. We’re committed to creating an inclusive, high-performing culture where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to thrive. If you’re excited about this role - even if your experience doesn’t tick every box - you might be exactly who we’re looking for.

We believe in equality for all and the transformative power of diversity. So why not join our vibrant team, where you can love what you do, love how you live, and most importantly, be authentically you?

Let’s make a difference together.

Love Work. Love Life. Be You.