Engineering Team Lead

Duel; Bristol; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading SaaS company in Bristol is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to guide a team of engineers in building customer-facing features. This hands-on leadership role requires strong JavaScript / TypeScript expertise and experience in Agile development. The ideal candidate will lead cross-functional teams, ensure technical quality, and mentor engineers, while contributing to the company's innovative AI-driven solutions.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

32 days of Annual Leave

Options scheme for all full-time employees

Company MacBook

350 WFH Set-Up

Headspace Contributions

Personal Development budget

2 additional days leave for volunteering

Qualifications

• Proven ability to lead by influence and collaborate effectively with teams.
• Solid understanding of software engineering best practices including version control and CI/CD.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to give and receive feedback.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-functional team of engineers to deliver features.
• Guide architecture decisions and maintain technical quality.
• Own hiring, growth, and development of your team.

Skills

JavaScript / TypeScript

Frontend web technologies

Agile development

Cloud infrastructure

Education

6–8 years of experience in software engineering

2 years in technical leadership

Tools

Angular

MongoDB

AWS

Job description

Engineering Team Lead

Location: Bristol Hybrid

Salary: 90000 - 95000 Share Options

Reporting to: VP of Technology

About us

Duel is a SaaS company on a mission to make Brand Advocacy the industry standard philosophy for building brilliant retail brands. It was founded by world record-breaking adventurer and former brand ambassador Paul Archer. We exist to show that companies built for advocacy can change the todays hyper connected world in which social media is now twice the size of all other media channels combined and entirely user-generated the most successful brands are the ones investing in people and in community not in ads.

The Duel Brand Advocacy Solution allows enterprise brands to do just that. We have onboarded over 60 influential brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Charlotte Tilbury, Spanx, Victorias Secret, LUSH and Elemis. The Duel teams global presence includes offices in New York City & London. Our team of 60 is composed of psychologists, brand experts and community builders combining cutting‑edge brand expertise with seasoned SaaS experience.

Backed by top European VCs Duel recently announced a $16 million Series A which will accelerate growth in the US from our base in New York and bring our entirely AI‑driven product vision to life to equip brands with the solution needed to drive growth through thousands of advocates, customers, creators and brand ambassadors.

The Role

We're looking for an Engineering Team Lead to guide one of our advocate engineering pillars. You'll be responsible for leading a brilliant team of engineers building customer‑facing features that power the workflows of thousands of advocates. The Advocate pillar is responsible for the end‑to‑end advocate experience: how advocates join, complete tasks, tier up and engage with brands. It owns the Advocate Portal including gamification to encourage customer engagement.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. You'll split your time between writing production code, mentoring engineers and driving the technical execution of product initiatives in partnership with Design, Product and Data. You'll also be working closely with our AI Teams to embed AI into our product surface area.

You'll energise teams, multiply engineering impact and communicate with clarity. You'll bring agility and speed to execution while applying AI pragmatically, leveraging it where it delivers immediate value and exercising patience where it requires time to mature.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross‑functional team of engineers to deliver features across the stack using Angular & TypeScript on the front‑end, a service layer and MongoDB as the data store.
• Shape the advocate pillar's technical stack to move quickly aligning on primary frameworks and deployment norms (AWS ECS Elastic).
• Own Advocate pillar outcomes; ship experiments and partner with Product to scope work, shape roadmap priorities and ensure on‑time delivery.
• Own the technical quality, stability and scalability of the systems your team maintains.
• Guide architecture decisions across backend services, API design and frontend experience.
• Drive team rituals (stand‑ups, sprint planning, retros) and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
• Coach and mentor engineers on your team helping them grow technically and professionally.
• Collaborate with peers across engineering, product, brand experience and AI & Data to evolve shared patterns of improvement, deployment pipelines and increased operational excellence.
• Own the health and productivity of the engineers in your team fostering a culture of iterative collaboration, ownership and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with other engineering leads and teams across Wise to ensure your teams work is aligned with the wider technical strategy.
• Own the hiring, growth and development of your team, double the team size and its impact.

Who we love to hire

• 6–8 years of experience in software engineering with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or mentoring capacity.
• Strong expertise in JavaScript / TypeScript and front‑end web technologies.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable features in revenue‑critical systems.
• Proven ability to lead by influence and collaborate effectively with engineers and non‑engineering teams alike.
• Solid understanding of software engineering best practices including version control, CI/CD, testing and documentation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to give and receive constructive feedback.

Experience working in Agile development environments

• Senior engineer level design & architecture; can contribute hands‑on (reviews designs, prototypes).
• You have experience working with and building distributed high‑scalability systems and monolith architectures.
• Designing, testing and deploying AI‑powered tools (agents, copilots, workflow automations) that improve efficiency and quality.
• You're a great communicator who can articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment and have experience working effectively with cross‑functional peers like product managers, designers and data engineers.
• Ability to operate within the gray and find the solution when faced with ambiguity.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: Angular TypeScript.
• Backend: TypeScript.
• Data / Infrastructure: MongoDB, Elastic, Snowflake; AWS / ECS; Cloudflare; Heroku.
• Source / Tools: GitHub; Cursor.
• Experimentation: LaunchDarkly.
• Security & Compliance: ISO27001 certified; plans for SOC2 and ISO42001. EU data residency.
• Key Integrations: Klaviyo (CRM), Hookdeck, major social platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook), TikAPI, BrightData, Apify.

The Dueligan Culture

We want to build a remarkable company with remarkable people and a remarkable culture that you will want to shout from the rooftops about. Advocacy is our north star both for our customers and our employees.

A High Trust Tight Ship full of Utterly Lovely & Bloody Brilliant People doing their Best Work Together.

We value trust and freedom above all else. Yet this must be combined with deep ownership, execution and clear candid communication. If this is not how you are at Duel or you break that trust you will not be around for long.

Dueligans combined are the largest shareholders in Duel. We take that concept of ownership seriously.

In‑person and remote working balance

We do much of our best work as a team together in the office which is why we are only hiring people within a commutable distance of our London or New York offices. However we also know that we do our best work alone at home and we all need to be able to balance work with life, childcare commitments and other responsibilities. The office philosophy is hybrid where you're encouraged to be in the office a few days a week namely when your team will be there.

However the name of the game with everything we do is freedom and flexibility. So you do as long as it's not at the expense of others.

Duel Perks and Package

• Flexible working hours - if you need to fit around childcare or need to work around your life we understand.
• Around 32 days of Annual Leave (28 excluding bank holidays and an extended break between Christmas and New Year when we close the office). On‑going training where required.
• Options scheme for all full‑time employees - it's important to us that everybody owns a part of the company and shares in the benefits of what we build.
• Company MacBook to work from.
• 350 WFH Set‑Up.
• Headspace Contributions.
• Personal Development budget and support.
• 2 additional days leave for volunteering.

Employment Type

Full Time

Vacancy

1

Yearly Salary

90000 - 95000