Technical Lead

Salary: £90,000 - 90,000 per year

Requirements:

• We have extensive software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership in product engineering squads.
• We have hands-on technical delivery experience designing, reviewing and delivering frontend user interfaces and backend services, APIs and integrations.
• We are comfortable contributing code and leading code reviews.
• We have experience working with Product teams to translate product goals and objectives into clear engineering work, acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes.
• We have experience in line-managing or directly mentoring engineers.
• We have deep knowledge of TypeScript and/or JavaScript and related frameworks, including React and Node.js.
• We have hands-on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL or equivalent.
• We have experience operating services in public clouds, with familiarity with AWS and/or Azure, and can design cloud-agnostic solutions.
• We have knowledge of containers and orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code such as Terraform or equivalent.
• We have experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, SLOs, runbooks and incident response, and can drive measurable reliability improvements.
• We have familiarity with threat modelling, least-privilege IAM, secrets management and encryption practices, and can embed security considerations into design and delivery.
• Desirable: we have experience supporting or planning multi-cloud environments and knowledge of cloud cost optimisation.
• Desirable: we have experience in B2B SaaS or Retail Media.

Responsibilities:

• We work closely with the Product team to refine requirements and prepare them for specification through iterative discovery and grooming sessions.
• We ensure the engineering team produces clear, fit-for-purpose technical design specifications in a variety of formats, including architecture diagrams, technical design specs, API specifications and data matrices/spreadsheets.
• We provide templates, guardrails and review cycles so designs are consistent and development-ready.
• We play an active role in the platform re-architecture and help plan how we will scale platforms to meet future growth and new business models.
• We oversee development and help unblock technical challenges by contributing code, participating in debugging and joining design pairings.
• We enable engineering autonomy and rapid delivery.
• We ensure our codebase follows best practices and establish high-quality code patterns, shared libraries and reusable components to reduce duplication and increase consistency.
• We lead by example in code quality through code reviews and hands-on contribution.
• We conduct technical and architectural reviews that are light, time-boxed and constructive to validate that designs are robust, maintainable, secure and aligned with SMG Technical Principles.
• We use reviews to coach engineers and make iterative improvements.
• We help drive delivery reliability and operational excellence by ensuring CI/CD pipelines are defined, Infrastructure as Code is used where appropriate, deployment patterns are available, and observability, automated alerts, runbooks and post-incident reviews are in place.
• We ensure production readiness for releases, working alongside the QA Lead to define pragmatic testing strategies and rollout plans.
• We partner with SREs to optimise cost, scalability and platform resilience across our platforms.
• We embed Security-by-Design into technical decisions, including threat modelling, least-privilege IAM, secrets management and compliance controls, in partnership with Security and Data teams.
• We work closely with other Technical Leads to agree and adopt best practices, tooling and patterns across squads.
• We participate in cross-lead forums and steward SMG Technical Principles and Standards to maintain consistency across platforms.
• We directly line-manage engineers, including mentoring, performance reviews and career development.

Technologies:

• API
• AWS
• Azure
• Backend
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Frontend
• IAM
• JavaScript
• Marketing
• MongoDB
• MySQL
• NoSQL
• PostgreSQL
• React
• Security
• Terraform
• TypeScript
• NodeJS
• DevOps

More:

We are SMG, the original pioneers in connected commerce marketing. Since 2008, we have partnered with major retailers, powered global brands and built meaningful connections with shoppers. We simplify the complexity of todays retail media landscape and deliver impactful campaigns, seamless personalised shopping experiences and strong results for our partners. This is a senior manager role based in our London office for 1-2 days per week, with a salary of up to £90,000 plus a £1,800 wellbeing allowance and up to 10% bonus. We offer a 10% discretionary bonus, £1,800 yearly wellbeing fund, free Headspace subscription, £500 yearly learning fund, four extra wellbeing days off, an annual summer conference, year-round celebrations, 4pm Friday finishes, and flexible hybrid working. We are a close-knit, values-driven team committed to equity, inclusion and helping people grow.

last updated 36 week of 2026