Lead Architect & Tech Leader for Scalable Microservices

Spencer Richardson; England; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Spencer Richardson is seeking a hands-on Lead Developer to own architecture, drive technical direction, and lead a small engineering team. This role requires designing systems, setting standards, and delivering scalable software.

You will work across microservices, Laravel/PHP, Go production work, event-driven and distributed architectures, and collaborate with product owners to translate requirements into robust technical plans.

Qualifications

• Experience with multi-service production systems and architecture ownership.
• Deep Laravel / PHP knowledge including queues, testing, and performance tuning.
• Production Go experience and shipping Go services.
• Clean architecture or DDD-style layering.
• Strong API design including REST and async patterns.
• Hands-on with MQTT, pub/sub, or message queues.
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals with observability and fault tolerance.
• SQL and data modelling with indexing and schema design.
• Git workflows and release management.
• Mentoring and leadership in engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and drive delivery of services.
• Define technical standards and enforce code quality across languages.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team.
• Translate product requirements into robust technical plans.
• Lead incident response for complex production issues.
• Communicate decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Drive sprint planning and long-term technical roadmaps.

Skills

Microservices architecture

Laravel / PHP

Go production

DDD / Clean architecture

API design

Event-driven systems

Distributed systems

SQL & data modelling

Git workflows

Automated testing mindset

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Terraform

Grafana/Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Spencer Richardson is seeking a hands-on Lead Developer to own architecture, drive technical direction, and lead a small engineering team. This role requires designing systems, setting standards, and delivering scalable software.

You will work across microservices, Laravel/PHP, Go production work, event-driven and distributed architectures, and collaborate with product owners to translate requirements into robust technical plans.