Engineering Lead - Recommend Team (Backend Focused - Hands on)

Description

The company is a global technology business that helps people and firms move and manage money across borders.

You would lead the Recommend team in the London office. The team grows the customer base through referrals and word of mouth.

The team builds referral platforms, onboarding for referred customers and reward mechanisms, and owns the journey until a customer's first international money needs are met.

The team includes frontend, backend and mobile engineers, data analysts and designers, who work together daily to improve the recommendation experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and mentor engineers, helping them grow and do their best work.
• Shape the roadmap and the technical and product direction with the Product Manager and your team, around three goals: reaching customers at the right moment, making sharing easy, and making customers feel recognised and rewarded.
• Own the technical strategy and delivery of the referral and word of mouth platform, and get hands-on when needed.
• Design scalable, resilient core technology so any team can launch flexible, incentivised campaigns and guide each referred customer to their first successful action.
• Make sure the team has the resources and planning it needs to commit to and deliver its roadmap.
• Stay close to the code and the product, set high quality standards and lead by example.
• Look after the health and productivity of the engineers, building a culture of collaboration, ownership and continuous improvement.
• Lead hiring, growth and development for the team and its impact across the company.
• Work with Marketing, regional and other product teams to create incentives and campaigns for different use cases and markets.
• Keep track of the wider Scalable Growth area and think about engineering as a whole, including how other teams can build on the platform and tooling.
• Understand the team's systems well enough to get hands-on, and take your turn in the on-call rotation for critical services.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading and mentoring software engineers, and enjoying seeing others succeed.
• Proactive and opinionated. You take on challenges directly, act beyond your formal remit when the goal requires it, and hold views firmly but stay open to change. You have a record of changing how teams work.
• A strong product and customer mindset, with experience building customer-facing products. You act as a peer to your Product Manager: you help shape discovery, challenge them, push for quick validation, then build for the long term once value is proven. You can cover Product, Design and Analytics when needed.
• Strong technical background in object-oriented languages such as Java and in modern technology stacks. You are comfortable coding to help the team and set the direction.
• Experience working with frontend and/or mobile engineers.
• Experience building distributed, highly scalable, event-driven, asynchronous and microservice systems, and decoupling them without disrupting the business.
• Experience in products where virality and complex user interactions matter, such as referrer and referee, social sharing, seller and buyer, or driver and passenger.
• You explain complex technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical people.
• You work well with cross-functional peers, including data scientists, designers, product managers and analysts.

Conditions

Based in the London office.

The company values diverse, inclusive teams and welcomes people from all backgrounds.