Middleware Engineering Manager

Location: Remote (UK)

Permanent RS Group is seeking a Middleware Engineering Manager to lead one of our Middleware teams. This role is key to delivering high-quality engineering outcomes at pace while fostering a pragmatic, delivery-focused culture. You will help shape and communicate a clear technical vision, explore smarter ways of working, and ensure strong engineering standards within a product-led environment.

The Middleware Engineering Manager leads a single agile engineering team, with line management responsibility for approximately 6–10 engineers. This role is part of the wider Middleware function and reports to the Head of Middleware.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Line Management : Provide day-to-day leadership, mentorship, and performance management for a team of engineers, supporting their growth and development.
• Technical Leadership : Guide technical design and delivery within assigned product domains, ensuring alignment with architectural standards and business objectives.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : Work closely with product owners, scrum masters, architects, and other engineering teams to deliver integrated and scalable solutions.
• Operational Excellence: Oversee the observability and operational health of production infrastructure, ensuring reliability, performance, and stability.
• Quality Assurance : Review engineering output to ensure quality, completeness, and adherence to engineering best practices.
• Production Support : Provide occasional out-of-hours support for systems owned by the team.
• Team Empowerment : Create an environment where engineers can deliver at pace, take ownership of features, and contribute to a positive and collaborative engineering culture.
  
  

About You

You are a collaborative and pragmatic engineering leader who enjoys building high-performing teams and delivering impactful technical solutions. You bring a strong understanding of modern engineering practices and thrive in product-led, agile environments.

You’re comfortable working across teams and disciplines, influencing stakeholders, and translating complex technical concepts into clear outcomes. You’re passionate about engineering excellence, continuous improvement, and creating an environment where teams can do their best work.

What You’ll Need:

• Strong background in software engineering with experience leading agile engineering teams in a product-led environment.
• Hands-on experience with Java or Node.js, and familiarity with modern backend and event-driven architectures.
• Experience working with AWS services (such as Lambda, SNS, SQS, IAM, and DynamoDB) and cloud-native development practices.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, and automation tools.
• Experience with API development and tools such as Postman and GraphQL, along with cloud and platform tooling like Terraform, Vault, Nomad, or Kong.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring platforms (e.g., Datadog) and performance optimisation techniques including caching solutions such as Redis.
• Good understanding of security best practices, testing strategies, and modern delivery pipelines.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across engineering and business teams.
• Analytical mindset with a passion for technology, continuous improvement, and solving complex technical challenges.
  
  

The extras you’ll get:

At RS, as well as the usual employee benefits you’d expect from a FTSE listed company, including annual performance bonus, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, private healthcare, in the UK&I, we’ve just introduced a number of new Family Friendly Policies including:

• Help for people to take control of ongoing Health conditions such as diabetes or asthma with £500 a year available for monitoring & consultation
• Support for Neurodiverse colleagues and families with neurodiverse members with needs assessment, diagnosis and post diagnostic support for autism spectrum, ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome
• Support for Women at different life stages from streamlined fertility support through to diagnosis and monitoring of both endometriosis and menopause

Helping our LGBTQ+ community through enhanced coverage for trans colleagues, including voice coaching, facial surgery, and gender confirmation surgery

Additions to Fertility coverage including IVF for lesbian couples and information/support around surrogacy and adoption for all.

We are RS

At RS we’ve been solving engineering problems for over 80 years: big ones, small ones, easy and difficult ones. We turn the ‘what ifs’ into the ‘why nots’, the impossible into the possible.

Our purpose? Making amazing happen for a better world.

We offer service and product solutions. We send out a parcel every 2 seconds, to over 130 countries. We provide over 700,000 in-stock and over 3 million unstocked products to more than 1.2 million customers.

We want people like you, as you are curious about things, you like doing things differently and also in a human way with empathy. Because that’s exactly how we partner with people – our customers, suppliers, colleagues and communities – to solve problems.

We’ll also invest in your development and wellbeing – because building a more diverse and inclusive culture, being ethical, responsible, and committed to our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) action plan is at the heart of everything we do.

Come and join us and we’ll help you to think big, do more and unleash your brilliance, so you do amazing things too.