Counter - Tech Lead

Counter - Tech Lead

Department: Counter

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Manchester/Leeds/Hybrid

Reporting To: Technical Director

Compensation: £55,000 - £70,000 / year

Background to the role: In 2024 Northcoders Group successfully launched a new standalone tech consultancy brand, Counter, in order to challenge the UK tech consultancy space and to provide organisations with a new, high quality and affordable onshore technology partner. Counter assembles and land teams of highly skilled Counter Consultants for our clients.

Teams are handpicked from our diverse and highly sought after Northcoders and Tech Returners talent pools and mentored to deliver client projects by dedicated Tech Leads. It is the Tech Lead's role to ensure that the Counter Teams are technically and strategically aligned with our client’s mission and up‑skilled to deliver within our client’s technology stack, working practices and ceremonies.

At the end of our engagements, clients are able to hire the Consultants as Full Time Members of their team, whilst the Tech Leads return to us to get ready to work on our next client projects.

Counter are now looking for a number of Tech Leads to join our team following a hugely successful first year where we landed a number of high profile clients including HMRC, Skipton Building Society and Manchester Airport Group. If this sounds like rewarding work that you would love to do, then please read on and click apply.

Reports to: Technical Director

Department: Counter

Base

Location:

Manchester or Leeds - Clients will often require travel and while we will focus on clients within a commutable distance you can expect the potential for traveling to the clients office on a regular cadence.

The technical lead role is core to the success of every client engagement that the consultancy will operate.

Our tech leads operate in two main capacities. Internally facing aspects, they provide technical guidance and development for their team of engineers - guiding the engineers on best practice and ensuring a focus on maintaining progress of the project.

Externally facing aspects of the project, the tech lead cultivates strong relationships with stakeholders. Through proactive relationship management, the tech lead ensures stakeholder buy‑in and alignment throughout the project lifecycle.

You can expect to balance hands‑on development work and non‑hands‑on work throughout projects. Typically at the start of a project the discovery and design stages utilise your leadership skills, resulting in approximately 80/20 (20% hands‑on development work). As projects progress you can expect a balance somewhere in the region of 60/40 (40% hands‑on development work).

• Maintenance and advocacy of plan
  • Working with our Technical Director, you will identify what the project is trying to achieve, why things need to change, how they need to change and what critical features need to be delivered for the project to be a success
  • Identifying external dependencies and building up relationships where required
  • Providing structure for estimates and ordering of work
• Advocate for team agile working practices
  • Supporting team in operating in an agile way. Whichever form of agile works for the team, you’ll support them with guiding ceremonies like planning or retrospective actions
• Provide technical architecture direction
  • A good tech lead will seek input from their team and external client teams whilst maintaining accountability for the technical architecture
• Technical expertise
  • Stay on top of the latest approaches, practices and frameworks. Keeping up to date with external sources such as the Tech Radar
  • Ensuring that the project meets the correct, required level of quality
• Team culture
  • You’ll establish and maintain the culture of your team. As an ecosystem, your team will experience various different cultures such as the wider Northcoders organisation culture as well the culture of the client in which the team operates. As such, you will have to consciously work on maintaining the sub‑culture of your team whilst integrating with wider organisations.
• End of project client onboarding questions
  • A key part of the offering…