Role Overview

Define and enforce clear ownership boundaries across the engineering team, by domain (Buyer / Seller / Platform), holding every contributor accountable regardless of sourcing model (permanent or partner-led)
Track and report Throughput and Instability per domain, so standards are visible and enforceable, not aspirational
Hold delivery consistent through every point of disruption the transformation introduces: nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain moves, headcount change
Partner with the Transformation Lead to ensure structural change doesn't degrade live delivery
Own the engineering standard across both the current platform and the target state
Review the Transformation Lead's roadmap for engineering-standard and operational impact before commitments are made
Own how modern and legacy architecture coexist during migration, guarding against legacy practices and assumptions leaking into the new platform
Lead and develop engineering capability across squads (including DevOps and platform functions)
Coach and support Tech Leads to build consistent leadership standards across teams
Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
Identify capability gaps and support hiring, development, and succession planning
Own resource planning, including capacity, skills mix, and on-call structure
Establish and run a two-tier resolver model: Ops on-call for standard support and runbook-driven issues, Product Engineering (Buyer/Seller) as the resolver group for genuine engineering problems
Build rota depth (minimum 3 engineers per domain, or full team where smaller) so resolution doesn't depend on any one individual
Drive a genuinely blameless Post-Incident Review culture, building on the existing Incident Management SOP
Embed secure coding practice, SAST/DAST scanning, and OWASP-aligned standards into the engineering definition of done
Surface security risk in business terms (exposure, cost to fix vs cost to carry) and route it to the appropriate decision-maker, rather than carrying risk-acceptance decisions unilaterally
Identify, log, and manage technical debt within day to day delivery
Escalate strategic trade-offs (rebuild vs patch, roadmap sequencing) to the Solution Architecture Lead, owning visibility and routine remediation rather than the strategic call
Work with Product Owners (Buyer and Seller) to translate roadmap items into scoped, sequenced engineering execution
Own technical design and implementation choices day to day, operating within established architectural patterns without requiring sign-off for routine work
Escalate to Product Owner Heads where scope or trade-off decisions sit above the Product Owner's remit

Requirements

Strong full-stack engineering background with Laravel/PHP, comfortable across monolith and microservices patterns
People leadership: hiring, mentoring, performance management
Direct experience leading an engineering transformation, restructuring teams, process, or architecture, while keeping a live, revenue-generating platform running throughout
Strong API design and system architecture experience
Production experience with MySQL, Couchbase or MongoDB, and Redis
GCP, deploying and operating live services at scale
Experience balancing legacy support against parallel investment in a target architecture
Startup or scale-up experience, comfortable operating with ambiguity and limited resource
Has lived through a MACH or composable architecture migration on a live, trading platform, not greenfield, and carries the scars: knows where the pain actually shows up (data consistency across services, search/catalogue re-platforming, vendor lock-in regret)
Multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic experience, enough to have an informed, opinionated view on GCP versus alternatives rather than default loyalty to whatever's currently in place
Comfortable working beyond PHP where the future stack calls for it (e.g. Node.js, Go, Python)

Tech Stack

Cloud
Google Cloud Platform
JavaScript
Laravel
Microservices
MongoDB
MySQL
Node.js
PHP
Python
Redis
Go

Benefits

Company Equity
In return for helping us to grow, we’ll offer you company equity, meaning you own a piece of this business we are all working so hard to build.
25 days annual leave + Bank Holidays
1 extra day off for your Birthday
Employee Assistance Programme
Perks at Work benefit platform
Opportunities for career development and progression

OnBuy

Open Positions (1)

Operations

Engineering & Operations Lead