About the role

As a Lead Technologist at dxw, you’ll provide technical leadership across teams delivering digital services for the public good. You’ll help shape how services are designed, built and run, ensuring they are reliable, maintainable and aligned with user needs.

This is a senior technical role that combines hands-on delivery, technical leadership and people support. You’ll typically work across three areas:

• Leading development — working within a delivery team, often as the technical lead

• Technical architecture — supporting multiple teams to design systems and make good technical decisions

• Engineering management — supporting people, contributing to team development and shaping how we work

You won’t be expected to specialise equally in all three. We’ll shape the role around your strengths, while ensuring these capabilities are covered across the wider team.

You’ll work closely with designers, product managers, delivery leads and clients to bring together technical and non-technical perspectives and support good decision-making.

Key responsibilities

• Take a leading technical role within multidisciplinary delivery teams.

• Set direction for how services are built, ensuring alignment with technical principles.

• Contribute hands-on where needed, including coding, reviewing and problem solving.

• Support teams to deliver high-quality, maintainable software.

• Support the design of systems across one or more projects.

• Review technical designs and help teams understand trade-offs.

• Help teams choose appropriate technologies for the problem at hand.

• Identify risks, constraints and dependencies early.

• Line manage and support engineers (in most cases), helping them develop their skills and confidence.

• Provide coaching, feedback and day-to-day support.

• Contribute to hiring and onboarding.

• Help create a supportive, inclusive team environment.

• Work closely with clients and stakeholders to explain technical decisions clearly.

• Build shared understanding between technical and non-technical colleagues.

• Support teams to work effectively in agile, multidisciplinary ways.

• Help teams navigate ambiguity and unblock delivery.

• Contribute to dxw’s technology practices, tools and standards.

• Share knowledge and learning across teams.

• Support continuous improvement in how we design and build digital services.

• Contribute to proposals and early shaping of new work where needed.

• Support teams to explore and apply emerging technologies, including AI, where appropriate.

• Ensure AI and data-driven approaches are used responsibly, ethically and pragmatically.

• Identify opportunities to improve services or delivery through new technologies.

• Help build shared understanding of AI capabilities and limitations across dxw.

About you

You’re an experienced technologist who enjoys working across delivery, architecture and team support in complex environments.

You:

• Have strong experience building and delivering production software.

• Have taken on technical leadership responsibilities within teams.

• Are comfortable working hands-on as well as contributing to architectural decisions.

• Understand how to design and build services that are reliable, secure and maintainable.

• Work effectively in agile, multidisciplinary teams.

• Communicate technical concepts clearly to a range of audiences.

• Support others through collaboration, coaching and shared problem-solving.

• Are comfortable working in complex, evolving environments.

• Experience with technologies such as .NET, Kotlin, Python or similar is helpful but not essential.

About dxw

We’re an employee-owned agency of technology, design and delivery experts.

We work with organisations in the public, non-profit and private sectors that provide digital public services across the UK. Something we call the digital public realm.

We take ideas and problems and turn them into live services that work. With a track record of designing, building and supporting vital services that fit seamlessly into users’ lives.