Engineering Manager

About ZAVA

We're on a mission to provide our patients with accessible and dependable healthcare at a fraction of today's cost. Our team of Doctors, Engineers, Customer Support Advisors, Marketers, Product Managers, UX Designers, Pharmacists, and Commercial and Operations Specialists works collaboratively to develop and maintain a digital healthcare platform that suits our patients' needs and schedules.

The pandemic changed our lives, requiring us to find flexible, remote and innovative healthcare solutions to meet our needs during challenging and changeable periods. Many of our patients turned to telemedicine as a convenient solution to getting their healthcare online from the comfort of their homes. By delivering a safe and efficient digital healthcare service, we've provided over 12 million consultations across the UK, Germany, France, and Ireland, enabling millions of people to have essential access to healthcare when they need it most.

It's our motivation to continue fulfilling their needs and to expand further to meet the needs of others, ensuring we're always there with the latest tech, treatments and advice. We're doing more than providing healthcare, we're enabling and empowering people by making healthcare work for them. We’re here because we care about healthcare, and we plan to be the largest digital primary healthcare platform for people across Europe.

About the role

To support our exciting growth trajectory, ZAVA is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a dynamic squad of 4-8 engineers – an ideal opportunity for both experienced managers or Tech Leads looking to develop on the management path.

Your focus will be to manage and mentor software engineers in your squad, supporting them to consistently deliver high quality products and features. You’ll strive for best practices utilising agile and iterative approaches, keeping outcomes and goals front of mind. You will encourage efficient, continuous and reliable delivery, enabling ZAVA to serve more patients effectively.

Key Accountabilities

Mentoring, guiding and coaching your squad of software engineers, fostering a positive, collaborative team culture. You’ll encourage strategic thinking in the team, support engineers in making key decisions, remove blockers, clarify priorities and overcome challenges (technical and otherwise).

Delivering new products, features and outcomes in a timely, consistent manner through close collaboration with your squad, broader cross-functional team (Product, UX, Architecture, Security, Data) and stakeholders. You will contribute to roadmap definitions, bringing people together to refine requirements, develop estimates, prioritize work and ensure alignment between technical execution, user experience, quality, and product vision. You advocate that engineers utilise an MVP approach, rapid iterative deliverables that allow us to learn early and contribute beyond just technical delivery.

Influencing processes and best practices by proactively looking to improve how the teams work. Your knowledge of different tools, processes and concepts (like BDD and TDD) will help the team translate ideas into features, reduce complexity and ensure the right people are involved before delivery commences.

Line management of engineers from one or more of our cross-functional teams. You will work closely with your direct reports to establish great working relationships and understand their career objectives, development opportunities and help establish career paths. Alongside other Engineering, Product and UX managers you will identify gaps in skills and capacity and actively contribute to organisational design and recruitment when needed.

Strive for excellence, quality and sustainability ensuring applications your squad is responsible for have sound, well architected principles that consider scale, resilience, security, cost, testability, operability and legal risks. You’ll maintain a balance between workstreams ensuring appropriate allocation of effort between developing new features that drive growth, ongoing maintenance, and strategically addressing technical debt to maintain long-term platform health and velocity.

Ownership and accountability - You take ownership for overall team performance and happiness along with the applications and services your team provides. You will hold yourself and the team accountable for architectural decisions, timely delivery and be prepared to fail fast, learn and progress.

Technical skills & experience

• Direct line management - establishing team and individual objectives, encouraging technical and interpersonal development
• Have overseen full development lifecycle for projects across a range of front and back end technologies
• Confident utilising agile working practices to manage project delivery from estimates to plan to production (we use Kanban)
• Proven experience working with teams to define solutions, identify risks & mitigations, collate technical visions & plans and keep stakeholders updated on progress, challenges, and changes.
• Sufficient software development experience to contribute to code reviews in at least one of the technologies we are using: NodeJS, TypeScript, Vue.js, PHP
• Critical thinking and utilising data to make informed decisions on the development and improvement of products, features and services
• You built it, you run it - Operational management of applications and services your teams develop
• Developing applications within a Cloud environment (we use AWS with a focus on serverless platforms)
• Advocate of continuous delivery and integration as a means for iterative development
• Familiarity with Atlassian suite (Jira, Confluence)

Nice to have, but not at all essential

• Worked in a healthcare or other highly regulated / legislated industry
• Experience in developing & managing relationships with key 3rd party suppliers to ensure optimal service and value
• Awareness of Domain Driven Design

Personal qualities

• Can work as part of a team
• Ability to adhere to regulations and policies
• Ability to follow tasks through to completion
• Desire to want to help patients - caring and empathetic
• Strong initiative

ZAVA Values:

Humble: You listen and take on feedback, you’re kind and caring to those around you.

Inquisitive: You question the status quo and dare to do things differently.

Resilient: You embrace change and face challenges.

Macher: You are innovative and rise above to improve, develop and deliver.

Collaborative: You actively share ideas and work together to drive goals as a team.

Benefits from the day you join:

🏖 33 days per annum pro-rata (inclusive of public and bank holidays) + birthday off

🧑‍⚕️ Free access to Wellness Cloud, advice, counselling, and corporate discounts

💙 20% off all ZAVA products & services for you and your friends and family

🏡 Remote, hybrid, and flexible working (role dependent)

💻 MacBook Pro (role dependent)

🌍 Flexible bank holidays - take the ones that matter the most to you.

Additional benefits following the probation period:

💰 £500 training budget per year

🧑‍⚕️Vitality Private Health Insurance + Vitality discounts inc headspace membership

🩺 Healthcare cash back plan through SimplyHealth

✈️ Company sabbatical after 2 years

🗺 Opportunity to work from overseas for 2 months each year (role dependent)

🤑 Cash vouchers after 3, 5, and 10 years of service

We are working hard to try and level the playing field wherever we can. We know from research that men are happy to apply for positions where they fit just 60% of the requirements, whereas women and underrepresented groups often will not apply unless they feel they are a super close match. If you don't think you meet all the requirements that you see above, we encourage you to apply and tell us what we can do to give you your best shot - if you want. Please note: certain positions will be subject to a satisfactory DBS check.