Lead Software Engineer

Location & Working Hours

Remote within ±4 hours of UK time. You’ll collaborate daily with two junior engineers in South Asia and coordinate with a London-based executive team. Participation in an out-of-hours on-call rota (approx. one week in three) is part of the role.

Why this role exists

We’re a tech-enabled UX agency. Our flagship product turns a multi-week manual UX audit into a 15-minute automated assessment powered by deep browser automation and AI. The platform is live, profitable, and now needs hardening for self-serve SaaS. Over the next 12 months you will:

• Stabilise and “SaaS-ify” the core assessment engine so customers can sign up and run audits unaided.
• Migrate bespoke infrastructure (Nix/NixOS) to AWS + Terraform, simplify CI/CD, and decide whether to split our monorepo.
• Strengthen auth (Zitadel) and billing (Stripe), and expand analytics (Posthog, Lighthouse SDK).
• Lay foundations for a broader UX tools suite that the consultancy and our clients will use end-to-end.
• Introduce standards and processes, on-call rota, incident runbooks, observability, to support growing client traffic.

You’ll own the technical roadmap, ship code daily, and translate priorities between engineers and the C-suite.

What you’ll do

• Hands-on architecture & coding – design and deliver TypeScript across Next.js, Node, GraphQL/tRPC and supporting services.
• Browser automation & AI integration - extend and maintain headless test flows (Puppeteer / Playwright / Selenium) that power automated UX checks; explore LangGraph.js and LLMs for deeper insights.
• Infrastructure leadership - blueprint AWS IaC (Terraform), phase out Nix configs, and keep pipelines green.
• Operational excellence - create an on-call rota, build alerting dashboards, and personally cover your rotation.
• People management - mentor two juniors, run lightweight agile rituals, and set engineering standards.
• Stakeholder liaison - convert consulting goals into technical milestones, demo progress to execs and clients, and flag risks early.
• Future tribe lead - help shape a squads-and-tribes model and step up to lead a tribe as we scale.

The profile we’re after

• 6+ years building production web apps, at least 3 with TypeScript across front end and back end.
• Proven delivery of SaaS or platform work - moving from prototype to hardened, multi-tenant production.
• Solid with React/Next.js SSR/SSG patterns, API design (REST and/or GraphQL), and database-backed services.
• Comfortable designing and operating AWS infrastructure via Terraform (or Pulumi, CDK).
• Hands-on experience with browser automation (Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium) for testing or data-gathering.
• Exposure to real-time analytics, auth and billing systems a plus (Hasura, Zitadel, Stripe).
• Track record mentoring engineers and running on-call/incident processes.
• Clear written and verbal communicator able to brief execs, consultants and non-technical stakeholders.

What we offer

• Competitive salary.
• Influence from day one: shape architecture, DevEx and engineering culture.
• Fast growth path - opportunity to build and then lead a larger tribe.
• Hardware, training budget and travel for occasional team off-sites.
• Supportive, low-bureaucracy environment where decisions translate quickly into action.

Interview process (2–3 weeks total)

• Intro call

Culture & mutual fit (basic engineering process questions)

30 min

• Technical deep-dive

System design, code walkthrough

90 min

Executive panel

• Roadmap discussion & Q&A

45 min

• Offer

References & negotiation

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Ready to scale automated UX assessment for the world’s leading brands?