Engineering Lead

Remote Worker LTD.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Moonpig Group is seeking an Engineering Lead for Search to guide a talented team across London or Manchester. You will blend hands-on coding with technical leadership to shape search experiences that power customer connections.

You’ll mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with product and platform teams while maintaining a strong focus on performance, reliability and delivery in a hybrid setup.

Qualifications

• Strong OpenSearch or similar search-engine experience required.
• Senior engineering background with leadership responsibilities.
• Ability to mentor engineers and guide technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Lead a search engineering team, align with product goals.
• Contribute to coding efforts 50-75% and deliver initiatives.
• Drive architectural decisions and best practices.
• Foster knowledge sharing and engineering excellence across the team.

Skills

OpenSearch expertise

Team leadership

Mentoring

Hands-on coding

Tools

OpenSearch

Job description

We’re the Moonpig Group - home to Moonpig, Greetz, Red Letter Days and Buyagift - and we’re on a mission to make people feel loved, celebrated and remembered. Whether it’s a card that gets them laughing out loud or a gift that makes their day, we help people stay close, no matter the miles. We’re proud to be leading the online gifting revolution, with brilliant products, clever tech and a whole lot of heart. Our platform makes it easy to create moments that matter - packed with personal touches and delivered with care. We’re not just about selling cards or gifts - we’re here to spread joy, spark smiles and make every celebration feel extra special. And with values that guide how we work and support one another, we’ve built a place where people (and ideas) can truly thrive. If you’re looking to make an impact, bring your spark and be part of something meaningful - we’d love to have you on the team.

Engineering Lead - Search | Manchester or London - Hybrid (1-2 days per week) | Competitive Salary + Benefits

About the Role

Search helps millions of customers navigate and explore our huge catalogue of products, making it easier to find the right way to connect with the people they care about. It’s a core capability for Moonpig, and you’ll help us build and deliver search experiences that support customer engagement and growth.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll spend around 50-75% of your time coding and delivering initiatives, while also helping the team plan, manage dependencies and understand how Search fits into larger projects.

You don’t need years of Engineering Lead experience. We’re looking for a strong senior-level engineer with deep OpenSearch or comparable search-engine experience, who wants to take the next step into engineering leadership. You’ll help guide a team of engineers while remaining close to the code. Line management will continue to sit with the Senior Engineering Manager.

Our expectations of our Engineering Leads

Good engineering comes first - You’ll have a great technical knowledge base and the experience to know what works and what doesn’t. We expect you to apply these skills in making the right decisions and applying best practices wherever possible.

Technical mentoring and leadership - You’ll be collaborative, inclusive and spreading knowledge wherever possible. People will be looking up to you for technical guidance and part of your role will be to help them on that journey. You will also be responsible for creating the right forums to drive engineering principles and practices across all of engineering. You have the autonomy to drive decisions, but it’s your responsibility to ensure everyone is involved.

Community Mindset - Engage with the engineering community within Moonpig, sharing knowledge and contributing to the continuous improvement of our practices.

Culture and Advocacy - You will play a key role in contributing to a supportive, inclusive, and growth-oriented culture. This includes encouraging knowledge sharing, creating opportunities for collaboration and learning, and helping to represent and advocate for our values both within the organisation and in the wider community. This is important to us because we believe in growing and succeeding together.