Lead Full Stack Engineer

Lead Engineer | EdTech Business📍 London (hybrid, ~3 days/week on-site) About the opportunityWe've joined the team at a globally recognised, San Francisco-founded education technology company as they enter an exciting new phase of transformation.We're technically looking for a Lead Engineer, but honestly, the title undersells it. What we really need is someone who thinks more broadly than that: a lead fullstack engineer who can bring structure and stability to a fast-moving platform, and be the person a largely junior team brings its hardest problems to.This is a genuinely hands-on role with real opportunity to shape a global digital product. You'll be in the detail, solving interesting performance and scalability challenges, and helping define how the engineering team works going forward.What you'll actually be doingAct as the senior technical voice across the stack, from architecture decisions through code review to untangling the things that keep breakingHarden a complex back end: multiple generations of e-commerce and payment integrations, Salesforce orchestration, and a layered Cloudflare/AWS setupBring engineering discipline to testing. QA is currently manual and a bottleneck, so you'll help shift the team towards automated, integrated testingMentor and unblock junior developers day to day, raising the bar on how the team buildsWork closely with the Director of Technology & Engineering and a Head of AI Operations, right in the middle of a much broader technology and AI transformation across the businessHelp sequence stability work against a busy roadmap, including AI-powered e-commerce initiativesWhat we're looking forA Lead Fullstack engineer with genuine backend and DevOps depth, comfortable in AWS, CI/CD and infrastructure, not just application codeThe stack is mostly React, TypeScript and Node.js, but we're pretty tech-agnostic on the person. Strong engineering fundamentals, curiosity, and the ability to get stuck into unfamiliar problems and figure them out quickly matter more than any specific toolExperience inheriting legacy systems and improving them incrementally, without resorting to a two-year rewriteA track record of being the technical anchor for a junior team: reviewing, mentoring, setting standardsPragmatic about testing and reliability, with the judgement to introduce automation where it actually earns its keepComfortable in a flat, informal, low-ego, highly international culture. Confidence without ego is a hard requirementBased in LondonWhy this roleThere's real scope here to mentor the existing team, raise the technical bar, and potentially grow into an Engineering Manager path over time. You'd be close to the code but also helping zoom out and see the bigger picture, with a clear mandate from the top to stabilise and modernise rather than just keep shipping features. Real autonomy, visible impact, and a genuine seat at the table.