Lead Software Engineer

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. Technical FoundationThe 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.Full-stack capability is required for this role: demonstrable production experience across backend, frontend and infrastructure, with depth in at least one and credible hands-on contribution in the other. Backend-only or frontend-only profiles do not meet the bar.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 & PeopleProven 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).Desirable TechnologiesAccess 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.C# / .NET — backend services, APIs and platform components.TypeScript / React — frontend and web-based ordering and management interfaces.Java — present across several F&B product areas.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 & ComplianceWorking 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-hea...