The Tribe Lead is the senior technical authority within their tribe. You own the quality of what the tribe builds, the technical direction it takes, and the capability of the engineers and quality engineers who build it. You are a practising engineer as well as a leader — credible in a design review, active in code review, and present in the detail of what your team ships.
Openwork operates a tribe model across its technology function. Each tribe has a clear mandate — whether that is decommissioning legacy, building new platform capability, or something else entirely — and the Tribe Lead is accountable for the engineering quality of everything that tribe delivers. The role is deliberately generic: the same standard of technical leadership is expected regardless of which tribe you are assigned to, and this job description applies equally to Clean Slate, New Ground, and any tribe Openwork stands up in the future.
You will set the technical roadmap for your tribe, own quality end-to-end, line manage the engineers in your team, and act as the primary technical voice between your tribe and the broader engineering function. You will uphold the architectural standards set by the Architects, apply the engineering standards set by the Head of Engineering, and challenge both when the evidence warrants it. This is a senior role. You will be expected to operate without close supervision, make sound technical decisions under ambiguity, and develop the engineers around you as deliberately as you develop the codebase.
This is a hybrid role, based 3 days a week from the Swindon office.