Engineering Lead: Hands-on Backend & Systems Leader

Midnite; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private health insurance

Income protection

Generous holiday policy

Flexible working

Home office setup support

Nursery salary sacrifice

Salary sacrifice programs

Retail discounts

Team socials

Job summary

Midnite is seeking an Engineering Lead to provide hands-on technical leadership while growing a team of engineers. You will balance coding with setting direction, collaborating with Product and Design to deliver reliable, incremental product improvements.

This role emphasizes deep backend expertise, full‑stack awareness, and responsible AI usage to drive scalable outcomes. We value pragmatic design, strong engineering discipline, and the ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear deliverables

Qualifications

• Significant backend engineering experience, including time operating at senior or lead level.
• Deep backend expertise with a full-stack, systems-thinking mindset across clients, APIs, services, data, infrastructure and operations.
• Strong Python skills, or experience with another modern backend language and a willingness to learn Python.
• Experience setting technical direction and designing, delivering and operating reliable systems.
• Experience in formally managing engineers, or strong evidence of readiness to own one‑to‑ones, feedback, performance and development for a team of three to six.
• Challenge assumptions constructively, helping Product and Design find simpler or more effective ways to achieve the intended outcome and the ability to break ambiguous, complex work into simple, safe deliverables.
• Solid database and production‑engineering fundamentals, including AWS, CI/CD and observability.
• You communicate with energy and clarity, bring others into technical discussions, and help create momentum across the team.

Responsibilities

• Technical direction: Set pragmatic technical direction and lead system design across clients, APIs, services, data, infrastructure and integrations.
• Hands‑on engineering: Create PRs, write production code and release features, alongside contributing technical designs, investigations and reviews.
• Product delivery: Work with Product and Design to turn ambiguous opportunities into clear milestones, small deliverables and frequent releases.
• People leadership: Manage three to six engineers through clear expectations, one‑to‑ones, feedback, performance management and development support.
• Coaching: Develop engineers through design discussions, reviews, pairing, debugging and production incidents without becoming a bottleneck.
• Engineering quality: Champion effective testing, observability, safe releases and strong production feedback loops.
• Technical judgement: Make sensible trade‑offs, keep risks visible and help the team improve systems following production problems.
• Wider contribution: Use AI responsibly and contribute to hiring, onboarding and shared engineering practices.

Skills

Python

Backend engineering

System design

Leadership

Communication

Observability

AWS

CI/CD

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Observability

Job description

Midnite is seeking an Engineering Lead to provide hands-on technical leadership while growing a team of engineers. You will balance coding with setting direction, collaborating with Product and Design to deliver reliable, incremental product improvements.

This role emphasizes deep backend expertise, full‑stack awareness, and responsible AI usage to drive scalable outcomes. We value pragmatic design, strong engineering discipline, and the ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear deliverables