Engineering Tech Lead - Platform Capability

ECA International

Greater London

Hybrid

GBP 110,000 - 160,000

Full time

2 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Enhanced Pension

25 days annual leave

Health insurance

Annual bonus

Long service awards

ClassPass membership

Hybrid work environment

Cycle to work

Season ticket loan

Personal development budget

Job summary

ECA International is seeking a Tech Lead to head the Capability squad, owning core back‑end services for our multi‑tenant B2B SaaS platform. You’ll lead a team while staying hands‑on, writing code, reviewing, and tackling the hardest problems.

You’ll shape how AI fits into our engineering workflow and drive secure, scalable platform foundations. You’ll work with Product, Delivery and other squad leads to convert requirements into solid technical solutions, with a focus on performance, security

Qualifications

8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong back‑end bias.
Demonstrated history of leading teams, setting technical direction and delivering high‑quality software.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a squad of developers while staying hands‑on with coding and reviews.
Define technical direction for platform foundations and ensure scalable, secure multi‑tenant back‑end services.
Collaborate with Product, Delivery and other leads to translate requirements into sound technical solutions.
Improve testing practices (TDD, automated testing, load/performance testing) and observability in production.
Drive AI‑first approaches and governance around AI coding agents in the engineering workflow.

Skills

Node.js

TypeScript

SQL

API design

Cloud‑hosted distributed systems

Tools

AWS

Terraform

GraphQL

Observability tooling

React

.NET Core / C#

Job description

Want to lead a team without giving up the code?

We’re looking for a Tech Lead to head up our Capability squad. Capability owns the shared foundations of ECA’s multi-tenant B2B SaaS platform, the back-end services every other product team builds on.

This isn’t a role where “Tech Lead” means spending your week in meetings and updating spreadsheets while you drift away from engineering. You’ll lead a team of developers, set technical direction and own the quality of what the squad ships. You’ll also stay hands‑on, writing code, reviewing it and working through the hardest problems yourself.

Increasingly, you’ll also help us answer a bigger question: what does a genuinely AI‑first engineering team look like?

What You’ll Be Getting Stuck Into

Capability is where our platform’s non‑functional requirements live. If our services are slow, insecure, fragile or hard to operate, every product team feels it. Your squad makes sure they aren’t.

You’ll Own Areas Such As

Identity and access management: authentication, SSO, roles and permissions, built on Keycloak
Tenant isolation and multi‑tenant data architecture
Platform services and integrations that other squads depend on
Performance, scalability, resilience, security and observability across the platform

You’ll Also

Lead, mentor and grow a squad of developers while staying close to the code
Treat non‑functional requirements as part of the design from the start, not something to deal with before go‑live: performance budgets, availability, security, auditability, operability and cost
Design and build back‑end services and APIs that are scalable, maintainable and secure in a multi‑tenant environment
Own technical direction for the platform foundations and help define what “good” engineering looks like across ECA
Work closely with Product, Delivery and the other squad leads to turn requirements into sound technical solutions, especially where the work cuts across teams
Give realistic estimates and challenge optimistic ones when needed
Step into difficult or stalled work, work out what’s blocking it and get delivery moving again
Raise the bar on testing, including TDD, automated testing, and load and performance testing
Make sure what your team builds is observable and supportable in production, and help run incident response and learning when things go wrong
Use AI throughout the software development lifecycle, from design and build through to testing and review
Help shape how AI coding agents fit into our engineering workflow, including the guardrails, review standards and governance that make them safe to use on platform‑critical code

Requirements

What we’re looking for

You’ll probably have 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong back‑end bias. We care more about what you’ve built, led and improved than about the number of years.

You’ll Need Strong Hands‑on Experience With

Node.js | TypeScript | SQL (ideally PostgreSQL) | API design | Cloud‑hosted distributed systems

You’ll understand what it takes to run a multi‑tenant SaaS platform in production. You’ll be able to explain the trade‑offs between tenancy models, design for horizontal scale, reason about failure modes, and know where caching, queuing and asynchronous processing help and where they hurt.

Non‑functional requirements should come naturally to you. You’ll have defined, measured and improved things like latency, throughput, availability and security posture, and you’ll know how to make them visible through logging, metrics and tracing.

Identity and access management experience is particularly important: SSO, OIDC, SAML, OAuth, authentication and authorisation, RBAC, tenant isolation, and tools such as Keycloak.

Above all, we’re looking for someone who combines technical depth with leadership. You can make a difficult architectural decision, explain it clearly, unblock an engineer and still get stuck in when the situation calls for it. You’d rather unblock three engineers than be the hero on one ticket.

You’ll also need to be eligible to work in the UK.

Even better if...

You’ve Worked With Some Of The Following

AWS (ECS/EKS, Aurora), Terraform, GraphQL, event‑driven or workflow‑orchestration patterns, observability tooling, React, .NET Core or C#.

If you’ve built or hardened authentication and authorisation for a SaaS product with enterprise customers, we’d love to hear about it.

And if you’re already experimenting with AI IDEs, coding agents or AI‑assisted development, and have opinions on how to use them responsibly on critical code, we definitely want to hear about it.

Benefits

ECA is evolving its technology and products, and this role sits right in the middle of that journey.

You’ll have the opportunity to influence how we build, how we deliver and how we use AI within engineering, rather than simply inheriting a finished playbook.

So, if you’re a strong Full Stack engineer who enjoys leading people, solving difficult platform problems and still actually building things, this could be a very interesting next move.

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