Tech Lead - PHP, 70/30 hands-on

Job Title: Technical Lead (API Focus)

Reporting To: Group Engineering Manager

Location: Remote working / Occasional travel to Bournemouth & Bristol

Job Type: Full Time 37.5 hours a week

Our Purpose

Nourish Care provides a digital solution to the health and social care sector which improves the process of recording, analysing, and sharing of information. We seek to enhance and simplify care in equal measures; To harness the power of care management software to improve the lives of people who need care and those who provide it.

We are in the midst of one of the most exciting times in our history and while we are the current market leader in the sector, we will not be complacent. We are dedicated to our purpose of a better life for everyone. We continue to revolutionise the care sector and our incredible employees are what make this possible.

About The Job

We are looking for an experienced Tech Lead to lead our API Platform Team. This role combines hands-on technical leadership with people management and architectural ownership.

You will be accountable for the technical direction, delivery quality, and ongoing evolution of our API-first platform as we migrate away from legacy systems.

You will also lead the development of reusable Vue-based modules that replace legacy Drupal-rendered functionality and support multiple products across the Nourish ecosystem.

The API Platform Team is small but highly focused and operates within a wider engineering organisation of approximately 80 people, including QA and Product.

This is a true Tech Lead role with a ~70/30 split between hands-on development and leadership responsibilities.

What You’ll Be Accountable For

• Owning the technical direction and architecture of the API platform
• Leading the migration from legacy applications to an API-first architecture
• Defining and maintaining standards for API design, versioning, documentation, and security
• Making pragmatic technical decisions and trade-offs with scalability, performance, and maintainability in mind
• Ensuring non-functional requirements are met (reliability, observability, resilience, performance)

Delivery & Quality

• Leading by example through hands-on development and high-quality code contributions
• Ensuring consistent engineering standards through code reviews, testing, and automation
• Working closely with Product Management to translate requirements into robust technical solutions
• Acting as the technical escalation point for the squad

People Leadership

• Line managing four developers, including performance management and career development
• Coaching and mentoring engineers to grow their technical and professional capabilities
• Supporting hiring, onboarding, and team growth where required
• Fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing team culture

Our Development Culture

• Product-focused agile environment using Scrum
• Strong emphasis on collaboration, pair programming, and code reviews
• Preference for clean, maintainable solutions over over-engineering
• Engineers are involved in sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives
• Continuous learning is actively supported through books, courses, certifications, and other resources

Technology Stack

• Backend: PHP (Symfony), MySQL
• Frontend: Vue.js (limited to new components)
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

Our systems handle thousands of requests per minute and manage databases with hundreds of millions of records. We design and architect with scalability-first principles, use caching extensively, and integrate with third-party services

Required Experience

• Proven experience as a Tech Lead, Senior Engineer, or in a similar technical leadership role
• Strong experience building and maintaining API-driven, backend systems
• Solid understanding of object-oriented design and scalable architecture
• Experience working across the full stack in production systems
• Experience collaborating closely with Product and QA in agile teams
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative, pragmatic mindset

Desirable

• Experience migrating or modernising legacy systems

Nourish Benefits

• 25 days basic annual leave, plus Bank Holidays
• In addition, we offer incremental leave benefit of 1 extra day for each completed year of service, up to a maximum of 5 additional days. This means long standing employees can enjoy up to 30 days of annual leave per year, plus bank holidays.
• Extra paid day off for your birthday
• Paid days off for volunteering opportunities
• Private Medical Insurance
• Pension
• Referral Bonus
• Health and Wellbeing platform including access to 24/7 GP & 24/7 EAP
• Counselling and support
• Variable impact workouts.
• Wellbeing videos including prompts for healthy behaviours
• Wellbeing, care and compassion leave policies
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Career Development opportunities and regular reviews
• Recognition and Rewards
• Social Events throughout the year

All positions at Nourish are subject to a satisfactory Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check, references and receipt of the appropriate Right to Work documents.

Nourish is proud to be an equal opportunities employer and we actively seek and embrace differences in thinking, experience, ethnicity, age, gender, faith, personalities and styles.

The different skills, experiences and backgrounds our employees bring to their roles creates a diverse and makes Nourish a special place to work

"Want to know what it means to care better? Then working with us is a great choice".

Join us at Nourish and experience a workplace where care, impact, and fun all come together.