Job Title - Lead Software Engineer
Location - Fully Remote (Must be UK resident with RTW)
Salary - Up to £60,000 + bonus + benefits
Role purpose
We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help shape the technical direction of our growing engineering team.
This is an ideal role for a strong mid-level or senior engineer who is ready to take their first formal step into technical leadership. You may already be the person others go to for technical guidance, design decisions or support, but you are now looking for a role where you can grow into line management, coaching, architectural ownership and broader technical decision-making.
You will manage a small team of software engineers, with up to five direct reports. You will report directly to the Head of Technology, who has a software engineering background with over 20 years of experience. This gives the role strong support, direct visibility and real influence over how the technology function develops.
The business is growing, and this is a high-impact role. You will help shape our systems, tooling, architecture and engineering practices as we scale.
Key responsibilities
Technical leadership
- Lead technical delivery across a small team of software engineers.
- Help engineers break down problems, make good technical choices and deliver high-quality work.
- Set clear technical direction while still staying close enough to the code to guide and support the team.
- Contribute directly where needed, especially on complex or high-impact work.
Architecture and system design
- Own architectural thinking across our application systems.
- Make or guide decisions around system design, technical patterns, tooling and platform direction.
- Ensure our systems are scalable, maintainable, secure and reliable.
- Work closely with the Platform Engineer on infrastructure direction, cloud architecture and CI/CD approach.
Line management and coaching
- Line manage up to five software engineers.
- Support engineers with regular feedback, coaching and development.
- Create a team environment where people learn, share knowledge and improve together.
- Help engineers grow their technical judgement and confidence.
Engineering standards
- Own and improve engineering standards across the team.
- Promote good practices around testing, code quality, documentation, observability and release safety.
- Support a healthy code review culture where anyone can review anyones work.
- Encourage pragmatic, thoughtful engineering rather than process for its own sake.
Cloud, infrastructure and delivery
- Provide technical direction on cloud architecture and infrastructure design.
- Work with the Platform Engineer on CI/CD, infrastructure as code and cloud best practices.
- Help shape how we use Azure, Pulumi and related tooling.
- Ensure infrastructure decisions support reliability, security, scalability and developer productivity.
AI-assisted engineering
- Help the team use AI tools effectively and responsibly as part of modern software development.
- Use and guide others on tools such as OpenCode, Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.
- Bring experience of other AI coding tools and workflows where useful.
Skills and experience
Essential
- Strong software engineering experience, ideally across Python and React.
- Good system design and architectural thinking.
- Experience contributing to technical decisions beyond individual tickets.
- Good understanding of Git, feature branching, pull requests and code reviews.
- Comfortable coaching, mentoring or supporting other engineers.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly.
- Comfortable working with AI tools as part of engineering delivery.
- Able to balance hands-on delivery with leadership responsibilities.
Desirable
- Previous experience as a senior engineer, technical lead or informal team lead.
- Exposure to line management or mentoring.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with infrastructure as code.
- Experience with Pulumi.
- Good understanding of cloud architecture and cloud best practices.
- Experience with Azure.
- Experience with Shopify.
- Experience working closely with platform, DevOps or infrastructure engineers.
- Awareness of security, observability and reliability best practices.
What we are looking for
This role is not necessarily for someone who has already been a long-standing engineering manager.
It is for someone with strong technical capability who wants to step into leadership properly. You should enjoy helping other engineers improve, thinking about architecture, making technical decisions and creating the conditions for a team to do good work.
You will need to be pragmatic, hands-on and comfortable with ownership. The team is small, so this is not a detached management role. It is a technical leadership role with real influence, real responsibility and direct access to the Head of Technology.
Benefits
- Bonus scheme.
- Fully remote working.
- Home office setup allowance.
- Training and development budget.
- BUPA health care plan.
- Birthday off.
- Volunteer days.
- High-impact role in a growing business.