Engineering Lead

Just Group plc; Greater London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - GBP 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A dynamic financial services company is seeking an Engineering Lead to oversee technical direction of their digital products including web and mobile applications. The role involves hands-on coding, leadership of a small team, and a focus on creating effective technical solutions. Ideal candidates should be adept at balancing speed, quality, and technical debt, with strong backend engineering skills in PHP or Python, alongside experience with AWS and relational databases. This position offers excellent benefits including a competitive salary, generous bonus scheme, and opportunities for career progression.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Pension scheme

Life assurance

25 days annual leave + birthday leave

Private medical cover

Generous bonus scheme

Access to the Headspace app

Employee assistance helpline

Qualifications

• Comfortable leading small engineering teams while remaining hands-on.
• Strong advocate for continuous delivery and developer experience.
• Experience evolving legacy systems with modern architectures.

Responsibilities

• Build full stack systems end to end and make fast, pragmatic decisions.
• Lead a small engineering team, setting direction while being hands-on.
• Ship frequently using quick feedback loops based on user input.

Skills

Backend engineering experience with PHP or Python

Relational database design using PostgreSQL or MySQL

AWS serverless and event-driven architectures

Infrastructure as code using Terraform or CDK

Leadership of small engineering teams

Continuous delivery and testing culture advocacy

Pragmatic decision-making

Job description

Overview

We're looking for an Engineering Lead to own technical direction across our digital products, from our customer-facing web and mobile apps, internal tooling, to data platform. This is a hands-on role where you'll write code daily while shaping architecture and driving engineering standards.

Key responsibilities

• Build and own full stack systems end to end, making fast, pragmatic decisions that prioritise learning and impact
• Partner closely with product and data to turn business problems into simple, effective technical solutions
• Lead a small, high trust engineering team of 2 to 4, setting direction while staying deeply hands on
• Ship frequently using short feedback loops, iterating quickly based on real user input
• Take full ownership of production systems, including reliability, performance and continuous improvement
• Spend the majority of time writing, reviewing and shipping code in a fast moving environment

What We\'re Looking For

• Comfortable leading small engineering teams with line management responsibility while remaining hands on
• Strong advocate for continuous delivery, observability, testing culture and developer experience
• Pragmatic decision maker who balances speed, quality and technical debt in fast moving environments
• Comfortable with on call rotations, incident response and running blameless post mortems
• Experience evolving legacy systems alongside modern, scalable architectures
• Solid backend engineering experience with PHP, Python or similar and strong relational database design using PostgreSQL or MySQL
• Hands on experience with AWS serverless, event driven architectures and infrastructure as code using Terraform or CDK

Our behaviours

At Just you’ll have the opportunity to develop your career, whilst making a difference to the lives of those around you. You’ll be part of a company with a strong and distinctive culture - we’re ambitious, curious and collaborative – and every decision we make centres around being Just and delivering the best outcomes for our customers.

What\’s in it for you

• A competitive salary, pension scheme and life assurance
• 25 days annual leave plus an additional day on us for your birthday
• Private medical cover and income protection, just in case
• A generous and highly achievable bonus scheme
• Opportunities to progress your career in-role and within the company
• Free access to the Headspace app, 24/7 employee assistance helpline and trained physical and mental health first aiders
• A variety of employee funded benefits available via our online benefits portal
• Plus, several additional purchase options available for you and your loved ones

Valuing diversity of thought and fostering a sense of belonging is critical to our business success, driving innovation and balanced decision making. Our work on DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging) aims to deliver a brilliant employee experience underpinned by a sense of belonging, where our people feel proud to work at Just.

We remain committed to our publicly disclosed HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter and Race at Work Charter targets and support a wide range of employee network and events, championing issues including intergenerational working, social mobility and neurodiversity.

Please submit your CV using the \'apply now\’ button. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted regarding next steps which may include an initial phone interview and in-person assessment.