Software Engineering Lead

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days leave

Private healthcare

Life insurance

Pension

Hybrid working

Volunteer day

EV car scheme

Share scheme

Cycle to work

Dental cover

Optical cover

Critical illness protection

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking an Engineering Lead to drive backend architecture for PHP, Go, and GraphQL. You will provide technical leadership, oversee delivery across multiple teams, and mentor engineers while ensuring production readiness and secure, scalable systems.

You will partner with product, security, and business stakeholders to balance speed and reliability in a fintech-focused environment, while benefiting from a hybrid working model and a strong emphasis on developer

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams in fintech or regulated environments.
• Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines and business needs.
• Strong design and code review capabilities with emphasis on security.

Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of backend architecture across PHP, Go, and GraphQL layers.
• Define technical strategy and oversee API and domain design.
• Drive delivery of multi-team initiatives and remove blockers.
• Coach and mentor engineers; contribute to designs when needed.
• Ensure production readiness, testing, and observability practices.

Skills

Backend architecture

Team leadership

Engineering delivery

Stakeholder management

Code review

Security standards

Observability

CI/CD

Incident response

Tools

PHP

Go

GraphQL

Datadog

Job description

Description

Ready to shape engineering at scale? As our Engineering Lead, you'll drive the platforms and tooling that help teams deliver faster, safer, and smarter.

Here at Cushon by the company, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances.

Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. We will do this by building simple, convenient, and delightful financial experiences centred on the individual. These will accumulate incrementally until one morning we will wake up and realise Cushon has become one of the UK’s best-loved financial apps.

We offer workplace savings products & pensions to customers, either directly, or through employee benefit programs at some of the largest corporates in the UK.

We're a technology-led organisation who believe we can offer great value to customers by building a user-friendly, smart, and cost-effective investment platform that automates many of the processes that would otherwise require large operations teams to manage.

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead to provide technical leadership for one of our teams. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations — the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

The Role

Technical Leadership

• Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers — balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability
• Guide API and domain design standards — clear service boundaries, consistent contracts, and pragmatic integration between modern services and legacy systems
• Shape event-driven and integration patterns so teams can build independently without breaking cross-squad journeys
• Champion automated testing, observability, and production readiness for backend services — PHPUnit, Go tests, Datadog, and safe release practices
• Oversee database and schema evolution practices — migrations, data integrity, and performance — in partnership with platform and infrastructure teams
• Lead incident response for backend-owned systems — triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality
• Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, Security, Performance and Optimisation — raising the bar through design review and hands‑on contribution when needed
• Support production readiness for high-risk changes — coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross‑team dependencies at the legacy/modern boundary

Delivery Leadership

• Drive successful delivery of your part of complex, multi‑team initiatives by coordinating resources, managing dependencies, and removing blockers
• Define and communicate technical strategy for your domain area, improving delivery processes and engineering practices within your area
• Build strong relationships across product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders
• Help teams maintain focus on priorities while managing technical debt and operational responsibilities
• Foster collaboration and alignment across teams, engaging with other Engineering Leads and leading engineering‑wide initiatives.

People & Developer experience

• Effective Line management and the passion to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership
• Stay hands‑on — contributing designs, code, config, and runbooks when that is the fastest way to reduce risk but also know when to step back and allow the team to take the helm
• Improve developer experience: local environments, self‑service tooling, documentation, and onboarding for new engineers
• Contribute to hiring and raising the bar for future Engineers

Qualifications

What you’ll bring

Leadership & delivery

• Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines, reliability targets, and business needs
• Expertise in championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality, and operational stability
• Skill in reviewing and contributing to technical designs that meet quality and security standards
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels
• Capability to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership
• Strategic and tactical decision‑making abilities
• Commitment to creating an empowering team environment that prioritises customer experience and engineering productivity

Technical experience

• Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast‑growing, regulated environments (fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance)
• Deep expertise in at least one engineering discipline relevant to your squad — backend, frontend, mobile, quality, or platform operations — with solid breadth across design, build, test, and run
• Track record of owning production systems end‑to‑end: implementation, rollout, monitoring, incident response, and follow‑up
• Experience leading technical delivery on complex, ambiguous initiatives involving multiple engineers, dependencies, or teams
• Strong architectural judgement — evaluating trade‑offs, setting direction, and aligning others on pragmatic, maintainable solutions
• Expertise in automated testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices in high‑stakes production environments
• Familiarity with observability and operational excellence — monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and blameless learning from incidents
• Understanding of security, compliance, and non‑functional requirements in regulated financial services
• Comfortable working across modern and legacy systems — evolving the platform incrementally rather than through unnecessary rewrites
• Ability to stay hands‑on — contributing to code, designs, and reviews when that is the fastest way to reduce risk or unblock the team

What we offer

• Enjoy a benefits package designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally.
• You’ll receive 25 days of annual leave plus an extra the company day to relax and recharge.
• Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind.
• Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company.
• We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community.
• On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle‑to‑work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We’re committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants. If you foresee any barriers, from the application process through to joining the company, please email [e-mail]