Exciting opportunity for a smart, ‘can-do’ minded individual to become a vital part of our technology team. Supporting and executing our growth plan will be key, making our technology smarter whilst exploring new opportunities.
About Liv-ex
With over 630 members worldwide, Liv-ex is today the global marketplace for the wine trade.
We offer a multitude of business services covering trading opportunities, data, logistics and various automation technologies; aimed at a diverse group of wine businesses, from ambitious young start-ups to established merchants and traders.
Our aim is to make the wine trade more transparent, efficient, and safe, for the benefit of our members and the market as a whole.
We are hardworking, committed and action oriented, retaining a valued neutrality in the market.
Founded in 2000, Liv-ex has grown to serve a growing number of members in the B2B sector, with an ever-expanding range of services. We help our members and other stakeholders to better understand the fine wine market and identify profit opportunities.
Summary Purpose
We’re looking for a Senior Technical Lead/Technical Manager with a strong backend focus and hands-on full-stack capability (React/TypeScript + Java/Spring Boot) to drive the delivery of scalable, high-quality web applications. In this role, you’ll blend deep technical expertise with strong leadership, guiding both architectural direction and team delivery. You’ll remain actively engaged in the engineering process spending approximately 10–20% of your time coding, 10–20% on code reviews and mentoring, and 10–15% on architecture and design. The remaining 45–70% will be dedicated to team leadership and cross-functional collaboration, including planning, stakeholder communication, and fostering a high-performance engineering culture.
This is a full-time, mostly office based in London, reporting directly to the Head of Technology. You will oversee an in-house team comprising 2 Technical Leads and 6 Engineers, while also managing coordination and delivery from an offshore team that includes a Senior Technical Lead, 2 Technical Leads, and 6 Engineers. The position offers clear growth opportunities whether toward deeper technical and architectural leadership or into broader strategic and managerial responsibilities while giving you a key role in shaping the future of our platforms and engineering practices.
Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership
- Lead the architectural direction and technical execution of full-stack applications using React/TypeScript and Java (Spring Boot).
- Own and drive the adoption of best practices in code quality, performance, accessibility, and cloud-native engineering.
- Remain hands-on with 10–20% of your time dedicated to high-impact coding, architectural spikes, and technical deep dives.
- Serve as the final escalation point for complex technical issues, platform-level concerns, and production incidents.
Team Management & Mentorship
- Manage and mentor an in-house team of 2 Technical Leads and 6 Engineers, while coordinating with an offshore team comprising a Senior Tech Lead, 2 TLs, and 6 Engineers.
- Conduct structured code reviews, drive technical knowledge sharing, and support career development for mid and senior engineers.
- Foster a high-performance, collaborative engineering culture that encourages ownership, accountability, and psychological safety.
Strategic & Project Thinking
- Oversee Agile delivery processes, including sprint planning, backlog grooming, and velocity tracking using tools like Jira.
- Work closely with Product Team to align technical outcomes with business goals.
- Translate strategic objectives into actionable engineering plans, ensuring timely delivery and high-quality output across teams.
- Contribute to roadmap planning, resourcing decisions, and platform-level priorities.
Innovation & Continuous Improvement
- Continuously identify and address technical debt, promote modular and maintainable code, and evolve the system architecture.
- Drive DevOps practices and automation improvements using CI/CD pipelines, Bitbucket, Docker, and AWS.
- Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, frameworks, and design patterns to keep engineering efforts modern and forward-looking.
- Encourage experimentation, proof-of-concepts, and continuous learning within the team to support long-term growth and innovation.
Knowledge, Skills, and Experience
Essential:
- 10–15 years of total professional experience in software engineering, with substantial time spent in full-stack and backend-heavy environments.
- Minimum 3–5 years in a Technical Lead or Engineering Manager capacity, leading multiple engineers and cross-functional initiatives.
- Proven experience overseeing distributed teams and driving consistent delivery and code quality across onshore-offshore team structures.
- Strong architectural acumen with a track record of designing and scaling enterprise-grade web applications.
- Demonstrated ability to operate in a hands-on capacity, while also guiding broader team direction and delivery health.
- Skilled in cloud-native development using AWS (S3, CloudFront, Lambda, API Gateway, IAM/Auth0).
- Deep understanding of SDLC, Agile delivery, and cross-functional collaboration (Product, UX, QA).
- Proficient in CI/CD, Docker, Git, and test frameworks like Jest and Cypress.
- Strong communication skills able to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience with Jira for sprint planning and delivery tracking; familiarity with Figma for UI handoffs.
- Track record of driving technical roadmaps, resolving architecture challenges, and modernizing platforms.
- Passion for mentoring, continuous improvement, and adopting emerging technologies.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a similar field.
Desirable:
- Experience migrating monolithic architectures to modular or micro frontend systems
- Exposure to server-side rendering (SSR) or JAMstack frameworks (e.g., Next.js, Vite)
- Contributions to open-source projects, internal tooling, or frontend design systems
- Strong UX sensibility or history of close collaboration with UI/UX design teams
- Experience working within regulated, high-availability, or performance-critical environments.
- Certifications such as AWS Certified Developer, AWS Solutions Architect, Meta Front-End Developer, or Certified JavaScript Developer
To apply, please send your CV with a cover letter detailing why you are interested in this role to [email protected].
