Engineering & Operations Lead

Role Overview

• Define and enforce clear ownership boundaries across the engineering team, by domain (Buyer / Seller / Platform), holding every contributor accountable regardless of sourcing model (permanent or partner-led)
• Track and report Throughput and Instability per domain, so standards are visible and enforceable, not aspirational
• Hold delivery consistent through every point of disruption the transformation introduces: nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain moves, headcount change
• Partner with the Transformation Lead to ensure structural change doesn't degrade live delivery
• Own the engineering standard across both the current platform and the target state
• Review the Transformation Lead's roadmap for engineering-standard and operational impact before commitments are made
• Own how modern and legacy architecture coexist during migration, guarding against legacy practices and assumptions leaking into the new platform
• Lead and develop engineering capability across squads (including DevOps and platform functions)
• Coach and support Tech Leads to build consistent leadership standards across teams
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Identify capability gaps and support hiring, development, and succession planning
• Own resource planning, including capacity, skills mix, and on-call structure
• Establish and run a two-tier resolver model: Ops on-call for standard support and runbook-driven issues, Product Engineering (Buyer/Seller) as the resolver group for genuine engineering problems
• Build rota depth (minimum 3 engineers per domain, or full team where smaller) so resolution doesn't depend on any one individual
• Drive a genuinely blameless Post-Incident Review culture, building on the existing Incident Management SOP
• Embed secure coding practice, SAST/DAST scanning, and OWASP-aligned standards into the engineering definition of done
• Surface security risk in business terms (exposure, cost to fix vs cost to carry) and route it to the appropriate decision-maker, rather than carrying risk-acceptance decisions unilaterally
• Identify, log, and manage technical debt within day to day delivery
• Escalate strategic trade-offs (rebuild vs patch, roadmap sequencing) to the Solution Architecture Lead, owning visibility and routine remediation rather than the strategic call
• Work with Product Owners (Buyer and Seller) to translate roadmap items into scoped, sequenced engineering execution
• Own technical design and implementation choices day to day, operating within established architectural patterns without requiring sign-off for routine work
• Escalate to Product Owner Heads where scope or trade-off decisions sit above the Product Owner's remit

Requirements

• Strong full-stack engineering background with Laravel/PHP, comfortable across monolith and microservices patterns
• People leadership: hiring, mentoring, performance management
• Direct experience leading an engineering transformation, restructuring teams, process, or architecture, while keeping a live, revenue-generating platform running throughout
• Strong API design and system architecture experience
• Production experience with MySQL, Couchbase or MongoDB, and Redis
• GCP, deploying and operating live services at scale
• Experience balancing legacy support against parallel investment in a target architecture
• Startup or scale-up experience, comfortable operating with ambiguity and limited resource
• Has lived through a MACH or composable architecture migration on a live, trading platform, not greenfield, and carries the scars: knows where the pain actually shows up (data consistency across services, search/catalogue re-platforming, vendor lock-in regret)
• Multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic experience, enough to have an informed, opinionated view on GCP versus alternatives rather than default loyalty to whatever's currently in place
• Comfortable working beyond PHP where the future stack calls for it (e.g. Node.js, Go, Python)

Tech Stack

• Cloud
• Google Cloud Platform
• JavaScript
• Laravel
• Microservices
• MongoDB
• MySQL
• Node.js
• PHP
• Python
• Redis
• Go

Benefits

• Company Equity
• In return for helping us to grow, we’ll offer you company equity, meaning you own a piece of this business we are all working so hard to build.
• 25 days annual leave + Bank Holidays
• 1 extra day off for your Birthday
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Perks at Work benefit platform
• Opportunities for career development and progression