Backend Software Engineering Team Lead

Lead the engineering team behind technology that helps organizations navigate global risk

At Verisk, we help businesses, governments, and organizations make better decisions through trusted data, advanced analytics, and technology. As a global leader in data-driven decision making, we combine deep domain expertise with innovative technology to solve complex challenges for customers around the world.

Verisk Maplecroft is a leading provider of global risk intelligence, helping organizations understand and manage geopolitical, climate, sustainability, human rights, and supply chain risks. Our data and analytics support critical decisions for multinational corporations, financial institutions, investors, and public sector organizations operating in an increasingly complex world.

We're looking for a Backend Software Engineering Team Lead to lead the backend engineering team responsible for the applications and services that power our products. This is a hands-on leadership role for an experienced software engineer who enjoys building high-quality systems, developing people, and turning complex business requirements into well-designed technical solutions.

You'll play a key role in shaping engineering direction, improving delivery practices, supporting team growth, and ensuring our products remain secure, scalable, and reliable. Most importantly, you'll help build technology that enables customers to better understand and respond to some of the most significant global risks facing businesses today.

Why this role?

This is not a role where you move away from engineering.

You'll remain deeply involved in technical decision making, architecture, development, and problem solving while also leading and growing a team of engineers.

The role offers a unique balance of:

• • Technical leadership and architectural ownership

• • People management, coaching, and team development

• • Product and stakeholder collaboration

• • Hands-on backend development

• • Strategic planning and delivery leadership

In the short term, you'll help lead the team through an important product delivery phase ahead of a planned April release. This period will involve increased planning, prioritization, stakeholder engagement, and coordination across internal teams and contractors.

Longer term, you'll help shape the future backend architecture of our platforms, lead a smaller engineering team, and take significant ownership of the services and infrastructure that support our products.

The role typically balances approximately:

• • 50% leadership, planning, architecture, and stakeholder engagement

• • 50% hands-on software engineering and technical delivery

The exact balance will evolve based on business priorities and release schedules. This role can be performed remotely within UK or hybrid in our offices of Bath or London.

You'll lead a team responsible for delivering backend applications and services that support Verisk Maplecroft's global risk intelligence products.

Key responsibilities include:

• • Leading, coaching, and developing backend engineers through regular one-to-ones, feedback, mentoring, and career development

• • Creating an environment where engineers are empowered to take ownership, raise concerns early, and continuously improve how the team operates

• • Working closely with Product, Program Management, QA, Platform Engineering, and technical leadership to define priorities and shape delivery plans

• • Translating business objectives and product requirements into scalable backend architecture and practical engineering solutions

• • Balancing security, maintainability, performance, scalability, operational reliability, and delivery needs

• • Breaking down complex initiatives into deliverable increments while managing dependencies, risks, and technical considerations

• • Remaining hands-on through coding, design reviews, debugging, prototyping, and solving complex technical issues

• • Driving engineering quality through code reviews, testing, documentation, observability, and secure development practices

• • Supporting improvements in CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment processes, and platform reliability

• • Managing backend services throughout their lifecycle, including maintenance, upgrades, incident resolution, and technical debt reduction

• • Reviewing significant technical changes and helping engineers provide clear, constructive peer feedback

• • Communicating technical decisions, delivery progress, risks, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

We're seeking an established engineering leader who has experience leading software engineers and delivering production-grade backend applications.

You'll likely bring:

• • At least 4 years of commercial software engineering experience, including significant experience building and supporting backend services in production environments

• • Strong Python development experience

• • Proven experience building and maintaining applications using Django

• • Experience with Flask or FastAPI

• • Previous experience leading, mentoring, or managing software engineers

• • A track record of taking ownership of complex or ambiguous requirements and turning them into successful technical outcomes

• • Strong stakeholder management and communication skills

• • Experience designing scalable APIs and backend systems

• • Solid understanding of REST principles, API standards, and API documentation

• • Strong relational database and data modeling knowledge

• • Experience with authentication, authorization, single sign-on, and secure API design

• • Experience implementing effective software testing and quality practices

• • Experience diagnosing and resolving issues across applications, databases, infrastructure, networking, and production environments

• • Experience working with cloud-hosted systems, ideally AWS

• • Strong understanding of backend security risks and practical mitigation approaches

• • Excellent judgment, problem-solving ability, and decision-making skills

Preferred experience

While not essential, experience in the following areas would be valuable:

• • PostgreSQL or MySQL

• • Docker

• • Redis

• • Celery

• • Sentry

• • AWS services and cloud-native architectures

• • Infrastructure as Code tools such as AWS CDK or Terraform

• • Designing asynchronous or event-driven systems

• • Agile delivery approaches including Scrum or Kanban

• • Product-led SaaS, B2B software, analytics, or data-rich environments

• • Supporting AI-enabled applications through APIs

• • Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar agent integration frameworks