Head of Internal Systems

(This is a hybrid role requiring 1-2 days a week in our Portsmouth office)

Summary

Lead Forensics is a rapidly growing, leading SaaS company with products in the B2B sales and marketing space. We’re seeking a Head of Internal Systems Development to a team that develops and operates internal solutions that support and accelerate business functions. This includes contributing to pragmatic build vs buy decisions, integrating third-party platforms where we buy, and building our own solutions where appropriate (including an increasing focus on Agentic AI-enabled workflows). The main focus is our internal CRM system and its integrations with other systems.

You will lead the internal systems development team day-to-day: shaping the backlog with stakeholders, guiding technical design, and ensuring high-quality delivery. This is a blended leadership and hands-on role, with coding an expected part of the position, and strong full-stack experience essential.

You will need to be highly competent in our core tech stack (.NET, MS SQL Server, with hybrid hosting into Azure) and able to critique and improve the quality of the code produced. Foundational knowledge of Agentic AI systems is strongly desirable. This role would suit someone with a strong development background, expertise in clean code, and strong interpersonal skills, who has moved into a management / team-lead career path.

Key Responsibilities:

Stakeholder Management

· Drive the planning cycle with business stakeholders to define and prioritise the roadmap.

· Elicit and document requirements (including non-functional requirements such as security, reliability, and auditability).

· Manage review of deliverables with stakeholders to ensure their needs have been met.

Implementation and Operations

· Lead solution design and refinement so the team has clear, actionable work.

· Lead the implementation work, supporting team members, unblocking work and getting hands on as needed.

· Ensure the quality, maintainability and operability of what you and the team build.

· Supporting the product that the team has built as it runs in production and resolving issues.

· Lead incident response, ensuring incidents where they occur are resolved with minimal business impact.

People Management & Culture

· Lead and mentor engineering team members, fostering a positive and collaborative environment.

· Conduct regular 1:1s, helping team members overcome challenges, supporting individual career progression, skills development, and job satisfaction.

· Run retrospectives and support the team in continuously improving ways of working.

· Champion and model company values, acting as a role model for team members and fostering a healthy work culture.

Required experience and skills:

• Excellent interpersonal and collaboration skills, including competencies to work directly with business stakeholders up to C-Suite.

• Experience across all areas of full stack development.

• A strong general aptitude for programming and problem solving. You’ll need to pick up new tools and techniques quickly and use them to solve problems.

• An understanding of how to apply a commercial mindset when designing and building systems.

• Experience of system design and domain modelling.

• Experience developing clean code using SOLID principles and design patterns and building this capability within teams.

· A strong understanding of what is required to create and operate maintainable systems.

· Experience with automated testing and quality assurance.

· An understanding of how to build systems that perform well at scale.

· Enthusiasm for building secure systems and implementing security best practices.

Desirable:

· Experience working in a mature CI/CD environment and applying DevSecOps practices.

· A technical / computer science degree, or equivalent professional experience.

Why Join Lead Forensics:

· A senior, hands-on role with significant influence over the solutions that impact the efficiency and productivity of the business.

· Work with experienced engineering, architecture, infrastructure and security colleagues on systems operating at meaningful scale.

· Light hybrid with 1 day a week in our Lakeside Office in Cosham, Portsmouth for onsite collaboration.

What we offer in return:

· Employment with a fast-growing UK SaaS company.

· Competitive salary and benefits.

· Be part of a fantastic company culture; we all display our Company DNAs and foster a “One Team” and growth mentality.

· Give back to the wider community with volunteer days, fundraisers and charity events.