Tech Lead

Who you are

• Technical leadership. You've led a team of engineers for at least two years, including line management, while still remaining hands on
• Backend engineering. You have deep expertise in at least one object-oriented language. You've designed, built, and run customer-facing backend systems in production
• Commercial or product thinking. You take a business goal, get to the root of what's needed and why, and turn it into a technical plan. You can explain a trade-off in terms of what it means for customers and the business
• AI leverage. You've built agentic workflows, or used AI to deliver engineering work you couldn't have done alone. You help your team do the same. You judge where it's useful. You check its output before it reaches production
• Communication. You write and speak clearly, directly, and concisely. You adapt technical detail to your audience
• Lending or payments experience. You've worked in lending, payments, or another domain where engineering decisions carry financial risk
• Experimentation. You've built systems that run controlled experiments, especially long-running ones
• Legacy migration. You've moved business-critical logic out of a complex legacy monolith and kept everything that depends on it working
• Working with data scientists. You've worked with data scientists from prototype to production, and know their work well enough to challenge it
• Python stack. You've worked with Python, Django, and PostgreSQL
• Frontend. You've built frontend features as well as backend services

What the job involves

• You'll lead the engineering behind how new businesses become iwoca customers – the application they fill in, the checks they go through, and the offer they get
• The New Customers team owns everything from a business's first application to a funded loan: the application flow, the logic that routes each application, the documents we ask customers for, and the models that set loan amounts and pricing. Its measure of success is the customer lifetime value it adds between sign-up and first loan
• The team sets its own goals and direction. It brings together engineers, data scientists, and product and strategy people. It partners closely with credit risk on the trade-offs behind every lending decision. Knowledge sharing is central to how the team works, supported by regular forums to share findings, and dedicated research and development time
• You'll lead two engineers and report to the head of engineering for iwoca's customer journey, from first application to repeat lending
• As the Tech Lead, you'll spend most of your time building. The team is moving its offer logic out of a legacy monolith into multiple services.. The next phase is yours to lead
• Autonomy and ownership. You'll shape what the team builds, decide how to build it, and own what goes live. You'll set its engineering roadmap, including what to pull out of the monolith, what to rewrite, and in what order
• Technical depth. You'll design the services that turn the team's models and rules into a lending decision for each application. You'll keep them reliable in production and easy to change as the models evolve
• Experimentation and learning. You'll build the systems that let data scientists test new models on live applications. Some experiments run for years, until each loan reaches the end of its term. You'll see the long-term results of the team's lending decisions
• Leadership and growth. You'll line-manage and coach the team's engineers, setting context and helping them own projects end to end. As the team grows, you'll decide the skills and make-up it needs, and hire the engineers to match

Benefits

• Work where you work best: Twice a year we rent houses in places like Sicily and the French Alps where each team can work together for a week poolside. We champion flexible working in all our teams
• Invest in iwoca: We want people to be invested in iwoca's success so after six months you'll be awarded share options
• Keep yourself healthy: We offer comprehensive health insurance and cash plans. You'll also get gym discounts and we host yoga classes in the office every week
• Start (and end) your day right: Each floor of iwoca HQ has a fully stocked fridge for breakfast and every Friday we unwind with beers and wine
• Life-work balance: We know your life outside of work comes first. We offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave for new parents plus a nursery benefit. We also have unlimited unpaid leave
• Learning and development: Whether you want to learn to code, experiment with motion design, or beat cognitive biases, you'll have time and budget to invest in your professional development