Solutions Engineering Manager

Role Overview

The Solutions Engineering Manager is accountable for the solution engineering practice: the people, the standards, and the delivery quality of technical solutions built across the enterprise technology platforms. Where platform managers own a specific platform, this role owns the capability that turns business demand into well-designed, well-built solutions on top of those platforms, and helps to influence those platform’s features and roadmaps.

The Technology Solution Engineering Manager runs the practice as an internal product and as a service. That means a clear demand intake process, published solution design standards, a growing library of reusable patterns, measurable delivery quality, and a team whose technical depth and breadth keeps pace with the estate they work across.

The practice spans cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, integration, APIs, automation, containers, and web hosting. This role leads a team of approximately five to ten solution engineers across junior and experienced levels.

Key Responsibilities

Practice Strategy and Service Management

• Define and maintain the solution engineering practice strategy, operating model, service definition, and multiyear roadmap.

• Manage the practice as an internal service with defined customers, engagement models, adoption targets, and success measures.

• Translate business and technology demand into a prioritised, resourced delivery plan.

• Establish the practice's position in the delivery lifecycle and its interfaces with architecture, platform teams, and operations.

• Maintain a transparent backlog and communicate priorities, capacity, and trade-offs to stakeholders.

Demand Intake and Engagement

• Own the demand intake process, including qualification, sizing, prioritisation, and acceptance criteria for engagements.

• Establish a clear front door for business functions seeking technical solutions, with predictable response and triage.

• Define and operate engagement models spanning advisory, assisted delivery, and full end-to-end solution delivery.

Solution Design Standards and Technical Governance

• Own solution design standards, design documentation templates, architecture decision records, and non-functional requirement baselines.

• Establish and run design review and technical assurance processes proportionate to solution risk and reach.

• Ensure solutions favour approved platform capabilities, golden paths, and reference architectures over bespoke build.

• Set the bar for technical quality, and hold the team to it through review, feedback, and correction.

Reusable Patterns and Capability Building

• Build and curate a library of reusable solution patterns, modules, reference implementations, and accelerators.

• Measure and drive reuse, actively reducing repeated bespoke solutions to the same problem.

• Identify recurring demand that should become a productised platform capability, and make the case to the relevant platform team.

• Embed AI-assisted engineering into the team's working methods, with appropriate review and quality controls.

Delivery Quality and Assurance

• Own the quality, timeliness, and cost of solutions delivered by the practice.

• Ensure every solution meets operational readiness criteria before production release, including monitoring, runbooks, and support arrangements.

• Track and reduce defects, rework, post-implementation incidents, and unplanned support burden.

Governance, Security, and Risk

• Embed security, compliance, and data-protection requirements into the practice's design and delivery standards.

• Partner with Cybersecurity, Architecture, Risk, Quality, and Compliance teams to maintain approved patterns.

• Ensure designs use approved identity, secrets, and certificate services, including Entra ID, HashiCorp Vault, and CyberArk.

• Track and manage technical debt, design exceptions, unsupported solutions, and remediation commitments.

Financial and Vendor Management

• Manage practice budgets, forecasts, resourcing, and cost-optimisation initiatives.

• Evaluate the total cost of ownership of delivered solutions, including support and lifecycle effort, not just build cost.

• Manage delivery partners and contract resources, including performance measures and contractual commitments.

Leadership and Stakeholder Management

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of solution engineers spanning junior and experienced levels.

• Build team capability through workforce planning, clear accountabilities, structured development paths, and certification.

• Manage performance, career progression, and the progression of engineers between levels.

• Build strong relationships with business function leaders, platform managers, architecture, cybersecurity, and operations leaders.

• Facilitate decisions across teams with competing requirements and priorities.

• Communicate practice performance, risks, roadmap progress, and investment needs to senior leadership.

Qualifications

Required

• Significant experience in solution engineering, platform engineering, technical delivery, or solution architecture, typically ten or more years, including at least four years leading teams.

• Demonstrated experience leading technical delivery across multiple technology domains at enterprise scale.

• Strong technical breadth across cloud platforms, integration and APIs, automation, containers, and hosting.

• Proven experience establishing design standards, technical assurance, and delivery quality practices.

• Experience managing roadmaps, service portfolios, technical debt, and technology lifecycles.

• Experience integrating security, compliance, and governance controls into design and delivery workflows.

• Proven ability to lead distributed, cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders.

• Demonstrated ability to develop engineers and grow technical capability within a team.

• Strong financial, vendor-management, communication, and organisational skills.

Preferred

• Experience operating a solution engineering or technical consulting practice in a global, regulated enterprise.

• Hands-on background in cloud, integration, automation, or hosting engineering, retained credibly into leadership.

• Experience with GitHub, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Backstage, and modern delivery toolchains.

• Experience with observability platforms including Datadog, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Cribl, or Observe.

• Familiarity with platform-product management, internal developer platforms, and golden-path delivery models.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering and its practical adoption within delivery teams.

• Experience working within a validated, GxP, or otherwise regulated environment, including data-protection obligations such as GDPR.

• Certifications such as AWS or Azure professional level, TOGAF or an architecture qualification, ITIL, or an agile or product-management qualification.

• A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information technology, or a related discipline.

Leadership Competencies

• Customer-focused and outcome-oriented mindset

• Strategic thinking with strong delivery discipline

• Strong technical judgement and architectural awareness

• Ability to balance standardisation with pragmatic delivery

• Genuine commitment to developing people

• Clear executive communication and stakeholder influence

• Financial and commercial awareness

• Bias toward reuse, simplification, and measurable outcomes

Measures of Success

• Solutions delivered to agreed scope, quality, cost, and timeline

• Increased reuse of approved patterns and platform capabilities

• Reduced proportion of bespoke build relative to platform consumption

• Reduced lead time from demand intake to delivered solution

• Reduced defects, rework, and post-implementation incidents

• Improved supportability and reduced unplanned support burden of delivered solutions

• Stakeholder satisfaction and repeat demand from business functions

• Reduced security findings and audit exceptions in delivered solutions

• Measurable growth in team capability, certification, and progression between levels

• Recurring demand successfully converted into productised platform capabilities