Lead Developer

This is an exciting new role working for an award winning and growing Tech company.

We’re looking for a hands-on Lead Developer to own architecture, drive technical direction, and lead a small engineering team. This is a role for someone who doesn’t just write code, but designs systems, sets standards, and ships scalable software.

MUST-HAVE REQUIREMENTS

Architecture & System Design

• Microservices architecture — has designed and owned multi-service production systems, not just contributed to them
• Deep Laravel / PHP knowledge — architecture, queues, testing, performance tuning, and ecosystem best practices
• Production Go experience — comfortable writing and shipping Go services, not just reading them
• Clean architecture / domain-driven design — Porto, DDD-style layering, or equivalent structured approach
• API design — REST, async patterns, and queue-based communication between services
• Event-driven systems — hands-on with MQTT, pub/sub, or message queue patterns in production
• Distributed systems fundamentals — idempotency, retry strategies, fault tolerance, observability, and scaling patterns

AWS & Infrastructure

• Strong AWS breadth — EC2, RDS/Aurora, Redis/ElastiCache, S3, SQS/SNS, IAM, VPC and networking fundamentals
• Cloud-native microservice infrastructure design — can architect, not just configure
• CI/CD pipeline ownership — has designed and maintained deployment pipelines across multiple services
• Cost awareness — track record of right-sizing or optimising cloud spend
• Leadership & Delivery
• Engineering team leadership — has managed or led a small cross-functional team (even informally counts, but must be genuine)
• Sprint and technical planning — leads delivery, not just participates in it
• Code review culture — sets and enforces quality standards across multiple languages
• Mentoring - can articulate how they've grown other developers
• Translates product requirements into technical plans bridges the gap between business and engineering
• Incident leadership - has owned and resolved complex production issues under pressure
• Stakeholder communication — can present technical decisions clearly to non-technical audiences

Development Fundamentals

• SQL and data modelling — writes and reviews complex queries, understands indexing and schema design
• Git workflows — branching strategies, PR culture, release management
• Automated testing mindset — champions testing across unit, integration, and contract levels

STRONGLY PREFERRED

• Experience scaling a SaaS platform — has navigated growth beyond initial architecture
• Multi-region AWS deployments
• Terraform / Infrastructure as Code leadership
• Kubernetes knowledge
• Observability tooling — Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent
• Data pipeline architecture awareness
• Mobile / backend API coordination experience
• Security architecture mindset
• Performance tuning at scale
• Prior hiring experience — has interviewed and assessed engineering candidates
• Budget ownership or FinOps awareness
• Technical roadmap planning at a product level
• Deep MQTT or event streaming experience