Lead Software Engineer

London – Hybrid

We’re working with a growing, international technology business at a pivotal stage of its scale-up journey. With a high-performing team of around 40 people and ambitious growth plans, the company is now seeking a Lead Software Engineer to help evolve its platform infrastructure and support the next phase of scale.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, this is a senior technical leadership role focused on building reliable, scalable systems and shaping how platform infrastructure supports engineering delivery. While not a people management position, it carries significant influence across engineering and plays a central role in technical direction, platform reliability, and operational excellence.

What you’ll be doing

Technical leadership & platform reliability

• Owning the reliability, scalability, and operability of production systems
• Leading improvements across infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments
• Driving best practices in observability, incident response, and operational resilience
• Ensuring platform foundations support continued growth and faster, more reliable delivery

Technical direction & architecture

• Partnering with the VP of Engineering on architectural decisions and platform strategy
• Guiding infrastructure patterns and engineering practices across the organisation
• Helping teams make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, reliability, and complexity
• Embedding best practice in platform design, infrastructure, and system architecture

Delivery & engineering excellence

• Contributing hands-on through coding and end-to-end ownership of platform systems
• Improving developer experience, tooling, and engineering workflows
• Supporting system scalability, performance, and production stability as usage grows
• Enabling teams to deliver safely, efficiently, and with confidence

Collaboration & influence

• Mentoring engineers and raising technical standards across the team
• Leading through code reviews, technical discussions, and hands-on contribution
• Collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to align platform and delivery

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including platform, DevOps, or infrastructure roles
• Strong experience building and operating systems in cloud environments (e.g. AWS)
• Solid understanding of infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and scalable distributed systems
• Experience delivering reliable production systems and owning problems end-to-end
• Broad technical depth across platform infrastructure and modern engineering practices
• Influence built on credibility and technical expertise rather than authority
• Clear communication and pragmatic decision-making
• Hands-on, delivery-focused, and team-oriented

What you’ll get

• A senior technical leadership role in a business entering its next growth phase
• High visibility across engineering and executive leadership
• Real influence over platform architecture, infrastructure, and technical direction