Software Development Coach

Software Development Coach - Edinburgh - Outside IR35
Day Rate - up to £545
Duration - 12 months

Our Client is looking to hire a an experienced, hands-on software engineering practitioner, required to improve engineering capability. The role works with product and enablement teams to strengthen delivery, reduce technical and operational risk, and embed secure, resilient and maintainable engineering practices. Its focus is practical coaching and organisational improvement: helping teams adopt shared standards, effective developer tooling, platform capabilities and responsible AI-assisted development where these deliver clear value.

Main Outcomes & Objectives

• Coach multiple product and enablement teams to improve engineering capability, delivery effectiveness and technical decision-making.
• Identify the most important technical, resilience and capability risks, then work with teams to deliver proportionate improvements.
• Drive consistent adoption of pragmatic engineering standards, secure delivery practices and shared ways of working.
• Improve developer experience through effective tooling, automation, self-service capabilities and platform adoption.
• Support teams in adopting AI-assisted software development practices and integrating them into existing workflows responsibly.
• Help engineers gain practical value from AI coding assistants, including Claude, for coding, code review, testing, troubleshooting and documentation.
• Turn promising AI capabilities into practical solutions with measurable outcomes for users, teams and the organisation.

Essential Skills & Experience
Must be passionate about software engineering and helping teams build secure, resilient and maintainable services. Candidates should demonstrate significant commercial experience in the following core areas:

Core Experience

• Hands-on software engineering and technical leadership across modern, cloud-based delivery environments.
• Coaching and mentoring multiple agile delivery teams, adapting the approach to different levels of maturity and need.
• Improving developer experience, engineering productivity and delivery quality through pragmatic standards, tooling, automation and platform capabilities.
• Introducing or supporting AI-assisted software development, with an understanding of responsible adoption, practical use cases and measurable value.
• Identifying and reducing technical debt, security, service resilience and knowledge-concentration risks.
• Building communities of practice and facilitating workshops, learning and knowledge transfer across teams.
• Supporting technical modernisation and platform adoption while balancing delivery priorities and organisational constraints.
• Communicating effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders to define problems, influence decisions and deliver sustainable improvements.

Technical Breadth

• Strong working knowledge of continuous delivery, cloud-native engineering, infrastructure as code, automated testing, observability, secure software development and service resilience.
• Practical experience with AWS, GitLab or comparable CI/CD platforms, APIs, containers and at least one modern programming language such as Java, Python, TypeScript or JavaScript.
• Working knowledge of large language models and AI-assisted engineering tools, including their practical limitations, risks and operating considerations.

Desirable Skills & Experience
Experience in one or more of the following would be beneficial:

• AI platform implementation or operational management, including AWS SageMaker or comparable model delivery platforms.
• Prompt engineering, agentic workflows and AI automation patterns.
• MLOps, model deployment, evaluation, monitoring and AI governance practices.
• Platform engineering, internal developer platforms and developer portal technologies.
• Kubernetes, container orchestration, code quality or accessibility automation tooling.
• Engineering governance, capability frameworks, career development or technical operating models.
• Public-sector digital delivery, open-source communities, cloud cost optimisation or technology modernisation programmes.

Please note that you must be eligible for BPSS Clearance to commence this post.