Technical Lead -Fullstack

Technical Lead -Fullstack

Job Overview

We're looking for a hands-on Technical Lead who still loves writing code. You'll build features across our React/Next.js front ends and our Django, PHP and Magento back ends. You'll review your team's code and keep the work moving every day.

This is a player-coach role. Expect roughly half your time on hands-on development and half on reviews, planning and leading a team of 8–12 engineers. You'll work closely with Product, QA and DevOps to turn ideas into reliable features that ship on time.

What you'll do

• Build features (hands-on)

• Design, build and ship features end to end, from React/Next.js screens to Django, PHP or Magento back-end logic and APIs.

• Take on the hardest technical problems yourself: performance, integrations, tricky bugs.

• Write clean, tested, maintainable code that sets the standard for the team.

• Review code and raise quality

• Review pull requests every day, giving clear and kind feedback that helps people grow.

• Set and maintain coding standards, branching rules and a clear definition of done.

• Work with QA to keep production bugs low and fix critical issues fast.

• Lead the team and keep work moving

• Break features into clear tasks, estimate effort and plan sprints with the Product Manager.

• Support daily stand-ups, spot blockers early and clear them.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pairing, reviews and regular one-to-ones.

• Keep stakeholders updated on progress, risks and trade-offs in plain language.

• Shape the technical direction

• Make architecture decisions and write them down so everyone understands why.

• Improve CI/CD, monitoring and release processes with DevOps.

• Help plan upgrades, reduce technical debt and keep the platform secure.

• Must-have skills

• React and Next.js: strong, hands-on experience building production apps with hooks, TypeScript, server-side rendering and state management (Redux Toolkit, Zustand or similar).

Back-end (at least one, ideally two):

• Django / Python: REST APIs (Django REST Framework), ORM, migrations, background jobs.

• PHP / Magento 2: custom modules, plugins and observers, checkout and catalogue customisation, performance tuning.

• APIs and databases: designing REST or GraphQL APIs, and working with MySQL or PostgreSQL, query optimisation and caching (Redis).

• Code quality: writing and enforcing unit and integration tests, and running thorough, constructive code reviews.

• Engineering practices: Git workflows, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, and cloud basics (Azure or AWS).

• Security: OWASP basics, safe handling of secrets and user data, and secure authentication.

• Leadership: at least 2 years leading or mentoring a team, planning sprints and keeping delivery on track.

• Communication: clear written and spoken English, and comfortable working with teams across time zones.

• Good to have

• AI technologies: hands-on work with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI), RAG pipelines, vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone), or frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex.

• Building AI features into real products, such as chatbots, smart search, recommendations or content generation.

• Using AI coding tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) responsibly, with clear review practices for the team.

• E-commerce experience, especially Magento 2 with a headless Next.js front end.

• Kubernetes, Azure DevOps, or infrastructure as code (Terraform).

• Performance work such as Core Web Vitals, caching layers, and CDNs like Azure Front Door or Cloudflare.

• Experience in Agile/Scrum teams using Jira and Confluence.

• Experience and education

• 7–10 years of software development, with at least 3 years as a tech lead or senior engineer guiding others.

• A proven record of shipping full-stack features to production.

• A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.