Engineering Tech Lead - Distributed Systems

Smarkets; London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Smarkets seeks an Engineering Tech Lead in London to guide a team developing distributed systems for its sports betting exchange. You'll optimize scalable solutions, manage technical projects, and mentor engineers, ensuring a cutting-edge tech stack. Join a dynamic environment with a competitive salary and diverse benefits.

Benefits

Stock options

Health insurance

Education budget

25 days paid holiday

Flexible working

Daily lunch provided

Qualifications

• 6-8 years experience in designing, developing, implementing distributed systems.
• Experience leading and mentoring engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and AWS cloud.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers in developing scalable and efficient exchange solutions.
• Manage technical projects and ensure system reliability and performance.
• Drive sprint planning and improve engineering processes.

Skills

Leadership

Distributed Systems

Scalability

Low Latency

Cloud Microservices

Kubernetes

CI/CD Pipelines

Infrastructure as Code

Tools

Terraform

Gitlab CI

Job description

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Engineering Tech Lead - Distributed Systems, London

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Client:

Smarkets

Location:

London, United Kingdom

Job Category:

Other

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EU work permit required:

Yes

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Job Reference:

1a9886dbd030

Job Views:

6

Posted:

29.06.2025

Expiry Date:

13.08.2025

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Job Description:

Smarkets is a betting exchange for sports and political events that has handled £37 billion in traded volume since 2010. Our goal is to fix the sports betting industry by creating a transparent platform that offers the best value for users, with not only the best odds but also the latest technology, alongside an amazing customer experience.

The Role

As a Tech Lead in our Engineering organization, you are leading a team of software engineers who build, manage, and maintain the services for Smarkets' core exchange functionalities that power our main products Exchange and SBK. You are here to help organize the direction of your team, guide their career growth, and ensure that we’re building the right stack to power the future of our products. You will be responsible for leveraging your team to ensure that our services are responsive, scalable, and performant.

Ultimately, you will be working alongside your team of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers, to drive the complex technical projects that help deliver the Smarkets product roadmap.

The successful candidate will initially take over technical leadership of the team and will transition to a tech lead manager position later.

The Team

We design, develop, deploy and operate the real-time distributed exchange systems that run 24/7 all year long. Our responsibilities include order matching, pricing feed, activity journaling, settlements, risk management and dissemination of market data. We care a lot about reliability, fault tolerance, throughput, and latency. Our high availability requirements dictate emphasis on testability and reproducibility alongside monitoring and alerting.

Our tech stack includes Rust (low-latency distributed services), Python (property based testing and scripting) and parts written in C++ and Erlang which are gradually decommissioned. We use Postgres as our main DBMS technology and Apache Kafka for queuing. Our CI is based on Nix and we ship daily to production.

You will be joining the team in a pivotal moment as we are transitioning from a monolithic architecture of our core exchange infrastructure to horizontally scalable architecture which can handle 5 times more throuput.

In details, you will:

Engineer and optimize exchange solutions, focusing on but not limited to scalability, low latency, reliability, monitoring, security and automation

Drive sprint planning, including proper scoping of tasks, and execution of the roadmap delivery goals, working alongside our Product Management function

Set the standard for quality engineering, including improving our engineering processes, to keep our level of excellence high

Collaborate with other leads and engineering managers, and other stakeholders in the implementation and future development of product roadmap

Be proactive during incident management with hands-on troubleshooting

Be the champion of the stack by demonstrating first hand how to implement functionalities in the right way, with an eye to the horizon and your mind on the present

Ensure the career growth of the engineers in your team as they advance in seniority

Represent the team in cross-functional meetings and internal events

Articulate the company vision and strategy to the team; the “why”, the business case, context, benefits any constraints etc

Eventually directly manage a team of engineers, from junior to seniors as well as hire great people and keep them happy, motivated, and challenged

We’d love to talk if you have:

Previous experience leading and mentoring exchange-focused engineering teams

Proven leadership skills, and interest in building and managing technical teams

6-8 plus years’ experience in designing, developing, and implementing distributed systems

Can demonstrate deep knowledge in running services in cloud microservice environments and hands-on experience with Kubernetes

Familiarity with AWS cloud

Familiarity with observability principles and tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Sentry Elasticsearch, Jaeger)

Excellent planning and communications skills and able to lead conversations with development and product teams

Preferred Skills and Experience

6-8+ years of experience building services for low-latency and high-scale products

5+ years of experience working with a compiled language - Rust is preferable, but experience with C++ or Go and interest to learn Rust is also acceptable

Previous experience leading a team technically or directly

Proven track record working in agile environments

Demonstrable experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform and Gitlab CI

Our Values

Push to win

Make others better

Give a shit

Be a pro

Bring the energy

Our values are at the heart of everything that we do. We believe these are the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering what’s expected of us in the best way possible for ourselves and for those around us

We offer a competitive salary package and benefits, along with a dynamic and collaborative work environment. Your work with us will make an impact and your voice will be heard
We are a diverse team with a strong work ethic and plenty of hunger to win. We have designed our benefits offering around Health, Wealth, Lifestyle and Development.

These include:

Stock options which vests over 4 years

Pension scheme - An impressive pension scheme via Aviva. We will match 6% if you choose the same

Health insurance

Fresh fruit and snacks provided in the office everyday! (tea, coffee, soft drinks also included)

We’re a member of a cycle-to-work scheme

We want to continue to invest in all our employees and do so by providing a £1000 yearly education budget that can be used on courses, conferences, books or training

25 days paid holiday + bank holidays to enjoy - you have the choice to carry over 5 days to the next year!

Flexible working - we want to provide a hybrid model approach to working and provide you with 2 days a week working from home

20 days a year of global working - we provide the ability to work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year

We will provide you lunch everyday in the office - you don’t need to worry about feeding your belly as we have it sorted with top quality food served by our in-house Chef Alex!

What happens next

We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around.

CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible

Let’s chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role

Technical Interview - Live Coding Pair Programming + System Design Interview

In Office Interview - “Experience and Mindset” Chat with the Hiring Manager + Lunch with other colleagues in the team

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Created on 29/06/2025 by TN United Kingdom