Engineering Tech Lead - Platform

Are you passionate about building innovative digital solutions and leading high-performing teams? We’re looking for an Engineering Tech Lead to join our dynamic Digital Engineering team and lead the development of core platform components, infrastructure, and processes that power our digital experiences.

This is a unique opportunity to drive technical innovation at scale, evolving the platforms that support over 50 websites and 10 mobile applications for some of the UK’s most iconic retail brands.

As an Engineering Tech Lead, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping your squad’s technical direction while contributing hands-on as a coder and mentor. You’ll wear many hats—serving as an architect, engineer, coach, and trusted advisor to stakeholders.

You’ll balance hands-on coding (around 30% of your time) with leadership responsibilities, ensuring your team delivers high-quality, scalable solutions. From defining roadmaps and breaking down work to championing best practices and Agile principles, you’ll ensure the squad operates at its best.

• Lead a high-performing squad that builds and enhances core platform services, infrastructure, CI/CD processes, and monitoring tools.
• Spend approximately 30% of your time coding, contributing to key projects and setting high technical standards.
• Mentor and support your team through pair programming, code reviews, and sharing best practices.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define roadmaps and priorities, breaking down Epics into manageable Stories and Tasks.
• Ensure your team follows Agile processes and ceremonies, implementing and maintaining best practices.
• Balance technical and leadership duties, shifting between a “maker’s schedule” (coding and deep work) and a “manager’s schedule” (team leadership and collaboration).
• Advocate for and implement modern engineering principles, including microservices, API-first development, and event-driven systems.
• Lead incident response, ensuring quick resolution and maintaining service uptime for critical systems.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, sharing articles, advice, and ideas to inspire your team.

Location: Hybrid, with 2 days at home and 3 days in our Shirebrook HQ

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience leading software engineering teams, balancing technical and leadership responsibilities.
• Proven experience developing and managing DevOps environments.
• Extensive experience working with Docker and GitHub workflows for CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong expertise in Terraform, configuring cloud environments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and caching solutions such as Redis.
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL/SQL databases and REST APIs in a microservices architecture
• A pragmatic, delivery-focused attitude, with the ability to guide technical decisions and align with business objectives.
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies and a strong understanding of team dynamics and processes.
• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to effectively engage technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable Skills:

• Experience with MACH and Composable Commerce architectural principles.
• Strong React, Next.js, GraphQL, TypeScript, Node.js, and C# expertise.
• Experience with tools like Amplience, Algolia, and commercetools.
• Demonstrated experience providing operational support for cloud-hosted systems, including troubleshooting and maintaining critical infrastructure.