Lead Developer

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

This is an exciting new role working for an award winning and growing Tech company.

We’re looking for a hands‑on Lead Developer to own architecture, drive technical direction, and lead a small engineering team. This is a role for someone who doesn’t just write code, but designs systems, sets standards, and ships scalable software.

MUST-HAVE REQUIREMENTS

• Microservices architecture — has designed and owned multi-service production systems, not just contributed to them
• Deep Laravel / PHP knowledge — architecture, queues, testing, performance tuning, and ecosystem best practices
• Production Go experience — comfortable writing and shipping Go services, not just reading them
• Clean architecture / domain-driven design — Porto, DDD-style layering, or equivalent structured approach
• API design — REST, async patterns, and queue-based communication between services
• Event-driven systems — hands‑on with MQTT, pub/sub, or message queue patterns in production
• Distributed systems fundamentals — idempotency, retry strategies, fault tolerance, observability, and scaling patterns

AWS & Infrastructure

• Strong AWS breadth — EC2, RDS/Aurora, Redis/ElastiCache, S3, SQS/SNS, IAM, VPC and networking fundamentals
• Cloud‑native microservice infrastructure design — can architect, not just configure
• CI/CD pipeline ownership — has designed and maintained deployment pipelines across multiple services
• Cost awareness — track record of right‑sizing or optimising cloud spend
• Leadership & Delivery
• Engineering team leadership — has managed or led a small cross‑functional team (even informally counts, but must be genuine)
• Sprint and technical planning — leads delivery, not just participates in it
• Code review culture — sets and enforces quality standards across multiple languages
• Mentoring - can articulate how they've grown other developers
• Translates product requirements into technical plans bridges the gap between business and engineering
• Incident leadership - has owned and resolved complex production issues under pressure
• Stakeholder communication — can present technical decisions clearly to non‑technical audiences
• SQL and data modelling — writes and reviews complex queries, understands indexing and schema design
• Git workflows — branching strategies, PR culture, release management
• Automated testing mindset — champions testing across unit, integration, and contract levels

STRONGLY PREFERRED

• Experience scaling a SaaS platform — has navigated growth beyond initial architecture
• Terraform / Infrastructure as Code leadership
• Observability tooling — Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent
• Mobile / backend API coordination experience
• Security architecture mindset
• Performance tuning at scale
• Prior hiring experience — has interviewed and assessed engineering candidates
• Budget ownership or FinOps awareness
• Technical roadmap planning at a product level