Senior Product Engineer

Who you are

• Deep, hands-on engineering background - this role must be staffed by someone who has shipped production systems, not someone who has only managed backlogs
• Strong commercial instinct: can build a business case, speak to P&L impact, and hold a line on ROI
• Exceptional stakeholder management across product, engineering, and finance without direct line authority over all of them
• Comfortable with ambiguity - platform value is often indirect and long-horizon
• Track record of contributing as an IC while operating at a senior, cross-team level
• Proactive, low-ego, and clear communicator - able to hold a line with leadership and pod leads alike
• Experience in platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling contexts
• Familiarity with SLA/SLO frameworks and incident management at scale
• Experience enforcing CI/CD standards across multiple teams or pods
• Prior work making "invisible" infrastructure legible to non-technical leadership

What the job involves

• Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1
• Work in small teams of exceptional people, who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo
• Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting
• We're building a larger, dedicated Platform team at Lendable, increasing our investment in the infrastructure that enables our products and engineering teams to scale
• We're hiring a Technical Product Manager to sit within Engineering and connect platform technology, reliability and commercial value
• You'll own what we prioritise and why, giving engineers the business context they need while helping Product and leadership understand the impact and opportunities that Platform enables
• This is a hands-on technical IC role, where you'll stay close to engineering through writing code, reviewing PRs and contributing to architecture discussions
• Working closely with the Platform Engineering Manager and Tech Lead, you'll help shape the Platform roadmap, connect technical investment to measurable business outcomes, and build the foundations that allow Lendable to move faster and scale with confidence
• Own platform stability as a primary accountability - SLA/SLO metrics, incident rates, release quality
• Hold release gating authority: block features from production that don't meet testing standards or introduce unacceptable regression risk
• Enforce CI/CD standards centrally so pods don't fragment into one-off solutions
• Track and report stability metrics alongside commercial outcomes - stability is the foundation that makes the rest possible
• Own the business case for platform investment and answer "why are we spending six engineers on this for three months?" in terms leadership understands
• Track platform impact in business terms: developer velocity, incident cost, time-to-market, reliability, capacity - e.g. "CXO rollout removes a 3-second API fan-out, reducing session abandonment" or "we can now handle 20k simultaneous logins"
• Input into headcount and investment decisions for the platform team
• Own the platform backlog, prioritised by business value and sequenced to unblock the highest-value product teams first - not driven by technical debt or engineer preference alone
• Make trade-offs explicit: "if we do X now, we defer Y by Z weeks - here's what that means for products depending on us"
• Ensure every initiative has a defined success metric that non-engineers can track
• Act as the single point of contact for Pod Leads: business requirements coming from pods and engineering/developer requirements flowing to pods; prioritise both in service of platform stability
• Make platform work visible to leadership - regular forums with product MDs and PMs to capture upcoming dependencies before they become blockers; represent platform work in leadership reviews; translate technical milestones into business milestones
• Drive cross-team collaboration and buy-in with other PMs; engage architecture in technical design
• Escalate when product teams make requests that would create unsustainable platform load or technical debt
• Write code, review PR's, and participate in architecture design as a core part of the role - not a side project
• Bring a strong technical voice to roadmap decisions without owning final architecture calls (that's Architecture and Tech Leads)
• Our tech stack:
• Platform & backend: Kotlin, AWS, Postgres, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes
• Gateway & clients: Node GraphQL gateway, React Native / TypeScript mobile app, Relay
• Tooling & observability: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jira, Confluence, Datadog, Sentry, Grafana

The application process

• Quick call with the Talent Team (30 minutes)
• Hiring manager interview (30 minutes)
• Technical and Product interview (90 minutes)
• Culture-add interview (60 minutes)

Benefits

• 💸 Best-in-class compensation, including equity
• 🏠 You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish - on the other days we all come together IRL to be together, build and exchange ideas (hybrid)
• 🍲 Our in-house chefs prepare fresh, healthy lunches in the office every Tuesday-Thursday
• 🏥 Comprehensive private health insurance (including dental, optometry and general wellbeing)
• 🚗 EV car scheme (Octopus)
• 🚲 Cycle to work scheme
• 🧮 Pension
• 🌴 25 days of annual leave - excluding bank holidays
• 🎊 Multiple opportunities to socialise with your team and the wider company
• 🏋️‍♀️ 50% off gym memberships at Virgin Active and Nuffield (via Vitality health insurance)
• 💻 Equipment provided for you to do your best work!