Lead Engineer

Role Purpose

As a Lead Engineer, you’ll be the technical backbone of your squad (of around 5-7 engineers) - leading from the front, writing code daily, and setting the standard for high-quality engineering. You’ll work side by side with an Engineering Manager, ensuring your squad is delivering scalable, well-architected software, while collaborating closely with a Product Manager to build and launch new products and services as a partnership.

This is a hands-on role, with a strong focus on designing, coding, and problem-solving. You’ll be the most experienced engineer in the squad, guiding senior engineers, responsible for refining technical requirements, making key architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers to help them grow.

With modern, cloud-native technologies (including Typescript, AWS, GraphQL) and the freedom to approach problems with fresh thinking, you’ll be building greenfield systems from the ground up. Expect to embed AI, automation, and best-in-class engineering practices into everything you develop.

If you love writing great code, solving complex technical challenges, and shaping the direction of a team, this role gives you the autonomy, responsibility, and impact to do just that.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Design & Development - Architect, build, and deploy scalable, high-performance software solutions, covering both client-side and server-side applications.
• Technical Leadership - Guide the squad in technical decision-making, ensuring the team follows best practices in code quality, design patterns, architecture, security, and performance.
• Hands-On Engineering - Spend most of your time writing and reviewing code, designing APIs, and ensuring high-quality, maintainable software.
• Full Stack Development - Build any necessary user-interfaces in collaboration with our UX team, and develop well-functioning APIs, and services.
• Mentorship & Coaching - Support and mentor engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence.
• Cloud & Infrastructure - Deploy and manage applications on AWS using Terraform, Kubernetes, and containerized workloads.
• Quality & Testing - Champion Test-Driven Development (TDD), automated testing, and CI/CD, ensuring deployments are secure and reliable.

Knowledge, Skills, and experience required

• Tech stack - We use TypeScript (Node.js & React), AWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes, GraphQL, Kafka, Mongo. You’re comfortable with all of these, and have extensive knowledge of JavaScript more generally, the AWS ecosystem, and running containerised applications.
• Past Experience - You are currently a Lead Engineer or Tech Lead, leading a small team of software engineers.
• API & Database Development - You have experience building and running robust, always-on APIs (both RESTful and GraphQL-based) and underlying services/apps including the databases that underpin them.
• Test-Driven Development - You're very familiar with testing frameworks such as Jest and Pact.
• Cloud & DevOps - You can build, deploy and run your systems end-to-end, with no manual configuration or intervention. We use Terraform and Helm.
• CI/CD - You have plenty experience managing and configuring CI/CD pipelines (we use GitHub Actions) for deployments.
• Observability Mindset - You believe in measuring everything. You’ve worked with DataDog (or similar) to ensure your team has the necessary visibility into system health.
• Tooling & Collaboration - Comfortable working with Git, Confluence, Jira, and modern engineering workflows.
• Mentorship & Leadership - You’ve mentored engineers at all levels, providing guidance, reviewing designs, and ensuring your team stays on the right track.
• Self-Starter & Problem-Solver - Ability to take a product challenge and develop a working technical solution, balancing pragmatism with engineering excellence.