Lead Engineer — Hands-On Architect & Tech Leader

United States Digital Space LLC; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

BJAK is seeking a Lead Engineer to take technical ownership of complex products and systems. You will design systems, write and review code, solve difficult problems and guide other engineers from idea to production.

You should be comfortable moving between architecture and implementation, making strong technical decisions while staying close to the codebase. This hybrid role requires office presence and periodic remote work.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with significant experience building and shipping production systems.
• Deep technical expertise in backend, frontend, distributed systems, APIs or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong system design and architecture skills with experience making technical decisions for complex or high-scale systems.
• Strong coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on.
• Proven experience leading major engineering projects or providing technical leadership to other engineers.
• Able to explain complex decisions clearly and influence engineers across teams.
• Strong product sense and ability to connect technical decisions to customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and execution of major products, features and engineering initiatives.
• Stay hands-on with engineering through coding, prototyping, code reviews, debugging and production problem-solving.
• Make architecture decisions and trade-offs balancing speed, scalability, reliability and maintainability.
• Break ambiguous problems into clear engineering solutions and execution plans.
• Set a high bar for code quality, testing, security and observability.
• Review designs and code from other engineers and provide clear feedback.
• Mentor engineers and strengthen technical capability across the team.
• Identify risks and bottlenecks before they become problems.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, design and AI teams to ship quality products.
• Improve tooling and automation to increase velocity and reliability.
• Own systems beyond release, monitor production and investigate incidents.

Skills

Software engineering

System design

Code review

Mentor engineers

Distributed systems

APIs

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

BJAK is seeking a Lead Engineer to take technical ownership of complex products and systems. You will design systems, write and review code, solve difficult problems and guide other engineers from idea to production.

You should be comfortable moving between architecture and implementation, making strong technical decisions while staying close to the codebase. This hybrid role requires office presence and periodic remote work.