William Lay

As Team Leader & Tech Lead at QinetiQ I lead a matrix team of software engineers, pairing people leadership with hands-on delivery as Tech Lead on customer programmes. I built the Bristol engineering team from zero to nine in 24 months against business strategy, and the management and communication initiatives that followed lifted team-feedback scores by an average of 12%, making it the most satisfied team in the Group and the only one ahead of target on every satisfaction metric.

At Roke I line managed 8 graduate and apprentice engineers alongside the day job, owning their career development and pastoral care, chairing the Healthy Workplace employee resource group, and interviewing engineering candidates. Coaching people through their early career, one to one, is where I first found that I got more out of growing other engineers than out of writing code myself.

I pioneered an agile transformation at QinetiQ that has since been adopted by 3 other teams, and led the move from Scrum to Scrumban, shortening delivery timelines without pushing the team past a sustainable pace. I coach DevOps practices across project teams, and wrote an Advent of Agile series, shared internally and on LinkedIn, to prompt teams to reflect on how they work.

I was brought into an existing development team as Senior DevOps (CI/CD) Engineer to streamline how it worked and protect delivery against a fixed contract timescale, resetting the team's ways of working and contributing to the engineering management plan that delivery was then run against; I moved into the Team Leader role four months later.

At Roke I led engineering and delivery for the Demonstrator work package on Project ZODIAC, a British Army Land ISTAR programme: designing the scaled-agile engineering structure across 7 teams (Roke plus 6 industry-partner sub-contractors), and owning delivery management and risk via a RAID log through to the MoD PC22 event, whose success secured a £40m follow-on contract. I also drove delivery for the application development team as Scrum Master on a flagship public-sector programme, shipping a cloud-native web application and companion desktop client against an aggressive fixed timescale.

Before any of this was a job title, it was a student society. I chaired Backstage Technical Services, the student technical production society, leading crews of up to 40 on the largest events in the calendar, and served as joint Societies Executive Treasurer in the Students' Union.

I was promoted from Caller to Senior Caller to Shift Supervisor over four University of Bath Alumni Fund telethons, running the floor and coaching callers through the conversations that persuade alumni to give.

In 2017 I was Student Employee of the Year: regional winner and national finalist for the "Step Up To Leadership" award.