Software Development Coach
12-Month Contract | Hybrid (Edinburgh / Glasgow)
Parity Network is recruiting on behalf of a public sector organisation seeking an experienced Technical Lead for an initial 12-month contract. This is a hybrid role, with team collaboration taking place in Edinburgh or Glasgow as required.
The Role
Our client is looking for an experienced and hands‑on Software Development Coach to help strengthen engineering capability across their digital teams.
This is an exciting opportunity for a highly experienced software engineering professional who is passionate about improving how engineering team's work. You'll coach and support multiple product and enablement teams, helping to improve delivery effectiveness, reduce technical and operational risk, and embed secure, resilient and maintainable engineering practices.
The role combines hands‑on technical expertise with coaching, mentoring and organisational improvement. You will help teams adopt pragmatic engineering standards, improve developer experience, make better use of tooling and automation, and explore the responsible adoption of AI‑assisted software development.
What You'll Be Doing
- Coach multiple product and enablement teams to improve engineering capability, delivery effectiveness and technical decision‑making.
- Identify technical, resilience and capability risks and support teams in delivering practical improvements.
- Drive the adoption of consistent engineering standards, secure development practices and effective ways of working.
- Improve developer experience through tooling, automation, self‑service capabilities and platform adoption.
- Support teams in adopting AI‑assisted software development practices responsibly.
- Help engineers gain practical value from AI coding assistants for coding, code review, testing, troubleshooting and documentation.
- Facilitate workshops, hands‑on coaching and knowledge‑sharing sessions.
- Build communities of practice that encourage collaboration, experimentation, learning and continuous improvement.
- Support the development of internal developer platforms, reusable engineering services and self‑service tooling.
- Develop lightweight engineering dashboards and measures around quality, delivery, resilience and continuous improvement.
- Assess engineering practices to identify risks, capability gaps and modernisation opportunities.
- Contribute to technical governance, skills development, career pathways and workforce planning.
- Engage with suppliers, partners and external communities where this supports improved engineering outcomes.
Essential Skills & Experience
We're looking for someone with significant commercial experience across software engineering and technical leadership, alongside a genuine passion for helping engineering teams improve.
You should have experience of:
- Hands‑on software engineering and technical leadership within modern, cloud‑based environments.
- Coaching and mentoring multiple Agile delivery teams with varying levels of maturity.
- Improving developer experience, engineering productivity and delivery quality through standards, tooling, automation and platform capabilities.
- Supporting the adoption of AI‑assisted software development, including responsible use cases and measuring value.
- Identifying and reducing technical debt, security risks, resilience issues and knowledge concentration risks.
- Building communities of practice and facilitating workshops, learning and knowledge‑sharing activities.
- Supporting technical modernisation and platform adoption.
- Communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Technical Experience
You should have strong working knowledge of:
- Continuous Delivery and CI/CD
- Cloud-native engineering
- Infrastructure as Code
- Automated testing
- Observability
- Secure software development
- Service resilience
- AWS
- GitLab or similar CI/CD platforms
- APIs and containers
- At least one modern programming language such as Java, Python, TypeScript or JavaScript
- Large Language Models and AI-assisted engineering tools, including their limitations, risks and practical applications.
Desirable Experience
Experience in any of the following would be advantageous:
- AI platform implementation or operational management, including AWS SageMaker or similar platforms.
- Prompt engineering, agentic workflows and AI automation.
- MLOps, model deployment, evaluation and monitoring.
- AI governance and responsible AI practices.
- Platform engineering and internal developer platforms.
- Developer portals.
- Kubernetes and container orchestration.
- Code quality or accessibility automation tooling.
- Engineering governance and capability frameworks.
- Technical career development and operating models.
- Public sector digital delivery.
- Open-source communities.
- Cloud cost optimisation.
- Technology modernisation programmes.
What's in it for you?
This is an opportunity to have a genuine impact on engineering capability across a large and complex digital environment. You'll work across multiple teams, helping shape modern engineering practices, improve developer experience and support the practical adoption of emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development.