Engineering Technical Lead - Platform Capability

ECA International; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Enhanced Stakeholder Pension

25 days annual leave

Health, Life Insurance + EAP Wellbeing

Annual bonus scheme

Long Service Awards

Cycle to Work Scheme

Season Ticket Loan

Free Eye Test

ClassPass Membership

Enhanced Family Leave

Personal development allowance

Job summary

ECA International seeks a Tech Lead to head the Capability squad, owning the back-end foundations of its multi-tenant B2B SaaS platform. You will stay hands-on, write and review code, and set technical direction across the squad.

You’ll tackle non-functional requirements, design scalable services in Node.js/TypeScript on AWS with PostgreSQL, and collaborate with product teams to translate requirements into robust solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, backend-focused.
• Strong hands-on experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Experience with SQL (PostgreSQL) and API design.
• Familiarity with cloud-hosted distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a squad of developers while staying hands-on.
• Define technical direction and ensure quality of what the squad ships.
• Design and build back-end services and APIs for multi-tenant platform.
• Work with Product and other squad leads to turn requirements into solutions.
• Provide accurate estimates and unblock engineers when needed.
• Promote testing: TDD, automated tests, load testing.
• Ensure observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response.
• Explore AI integration in development and guardrails.

Skills

Node.js

TypeScript

SQL (PostgreSQL)

API design

Cloud-hosted distributed systems

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 work mainly in Node.js and TypeScript on AWS, with PostgreSQL behind it, and you’ll help shape how the platform evolves as the business grows.

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…

• 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.

You’ll also receive

• Enhanced Stakeholder Pension Contribution


• 25 days annual leave


• Health, Life Insurance + EAP Wellbeing Support


• Eligible for Annual Bonus Scheme


• Long Service Awards


• ClassPass Membership


• Enhanced Family Leave


• Up to £1,000 per year for personal development & training


• Season Ticket Loan


• Flexible/hybrid Work Environment


• Cycle to Work Scheme


• Free Eye Test