Software Engineering Team Lead: Core Platform

TN United Kingdom; Bristol; Hybrid; GBP 85,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative company in Bristol is seeking a Software Engineering Team Lead to guide their Core Platform team in building scalable solutions. This role combines strategic leadership with hands-on coding, empowering a team to enhance the company's SaaS platform. You'll play a key role in shaping the technical direction, ensuring robust architecture while fostering a collaborative culture. With a focus on modern engineering practices and a commitment to personal development, this position offers a unique opportunity to make a significant impact in a dynamic environment. If you're passionate about technology and team growth, we want to hear from you!

Benefits

Flexible working hours

32 days of Annual Leave

Options scheme for all employees

Company MacBook

Headspace Contributions

Personal Development budget

2 additional days leave for volunteering

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering.
• 1–2 years leading a team with ownership of complex projects.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Core Platform team with strategic vision and hands-on delivery.
• Set technical direction and ensure strong architectural decisions.

Skills

Backend Engineering

Team Leadership

Cloud Infrastructure

TypeScript

MongoDB

CI/CD Workflows

Distributed Systems

Tools

AWS

Docker

ElasticSearch

Job description

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Software Engineering Team Lead: Core Platform, Bristol

Client: Duel

Location: Bristol, United Kingdom

Job Category: Other

EU work permit required: Yes

Job Reference:

Job Views:

6

Posted:

05.05.2025

Expiry Date:

19.06.2025

Job Description:

Duel was founded by world-record-breaking adventurer and former brand ambassador Paul Archer, alongside viral games developer Naio Tsarouchis.

They believed that purpose-led brands are changing the way we all live and set out to define how the greatest brands of tomorrow grow through Brand Advocacy. Duel, a B-Corp, exists to show there’s a better way to build businesses; proving that caring for people and planet builds brand, which builds long-term and exponential profit returns.

Our Brand Advocacy Platform allows mid-level to enterprise brands to do just that - scaling how they manage their relationships with thousands of advocates, affiliates, employees and brand ambassadors. We’re proud today that brands such as Elemis, Abercrombie & Fitch, Monica Vinader, Charlotte Tilbury, Rab, Pandora, Victoria's Secret and Tropicfeel (to name a few) are doing just that.

The Duel team comprises psychologists, brand experts and community builders from companies including Amazon, Treatwell, Bain, Mimecast and Lululemon as well as young entrepreneurs, psychologists and other exceptional talents.

Software Engineering Team Lead: Core Platform

Hybrid:Remote/Duel Bristol Office

Salary range: £85,000 basic + options

Reporting to: VP of Technology, Joe Mathews

About Us

Duel is a SaaS company on a mission to make Brand Advocacy the industry standard playbook for building brilliant retail brands. It was founded by world record breaking adventurer and former brand ambassador Paul Archer, alongside viral games developer Naio Tsarouchis, and we exist to show there’s a better way to build businesses, to build a better future, proving that caring for people builds brand, which builds long term and exponential profit returns.

The Duel Brand Advocacy Platform allows enterprise brands to do just that, scaling how they manage their relationships with thousands of advocates, customers, creators and brand ambassadors. We’re proud today that brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Charlotte Tilbury, Spanx, Victoria’s Secret and Elemis (to name a few, but not to name some household names that we can’t talk about yet) are doing just that. The Duel team comprises psychologists, brand experts and community builders, combining cutting edge brand expertise, with seasoned SaaS experience.

The Role

We’re hiring a Team Lead Engineer, to join our growing engineering team and support the scaling of the Duel SaaS platform.

As it stands, our Core Platform team reports directly to Joe, VP of Technology, ensuring close alignment with company-wide engineering goals as we grow rapidly. But as we scale, we’re creating a new leadership role to unlock even greater impact. You’ll empower Joe to focus on long-term strategy while you take the reins on engineering leadership for a high-performing team.

The Core Platform team is the engine behind our engineering strategy. We build reusable services, establish design patterns, and architect scalable infrastructure enabling our product squads to move fast without compromising security or quality. As our products evolve and customer needs become more complex, strong technical leadership is essential to keep our systems fast, secure, and resilient.

This role is a critical step in our growth. You’ll bring clarity, direction, and momentum to the team owning the delivery of foundational platform work and ensuring our technical stack remains robust and modular. If you’re excited by the idea of driving high performance and shaping the systems that power product velocity at scale, we’d love to meet you.

Our technology stack primarily includes Angular (latest version), TypeScript, Node.js, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS, and Elastic Beanstalk (AWS), with an increasing focus on real-time data processing and scalable services. If you enjoy working across front-end, back-end, infrastructure, and everything in between, this role is for you.

We’re Looking for Someone Who Will…

• Lead and empower the Core Platform team with both strategic vision and hands-on delivery oversight. This will be a 50/50 role between leadership and hands on coding
• Adopt an AI-first mindset—consistently leveraging artificial intelligence across all phases of the workflow to enhance efficiency, innovation, and strategic outcomes.
• Set technical direction and ensure strong architectural decisions across all platform initiatives.
• Balance long-term technical health with short-term delivery needs, guiding the team through smart tradeoffs.
• Bring clarity to roadmaps and delivery timelines, ensuring work is scoped, prioritised, and executed effectively.
• Run effective planning rituals including regular sprint planning, standups, and retrospectives.
• Build and evolve the platform foundations—from shared services to security, observability, and tooling—that enable product teams to move fast and stay safe.
• Drive platform improvements to support scale, availability, and performance as our business grows.
• Level up developer experience by improving CI/CD pipelines, streamlining internal tooling, and reducing friction.
• Champion internal standards across libraries, interfaces, and development patterns to promote consistency and velocity.
• Manage and grow a small, high-performing team of 2–3 mid-to-senior engineers.
• Provide regular coaching, feedback, and career development support through structured check-ins and growth conversations.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive team culture, encouraging shared ownership of the platform.
• Build team pride and identity, connecting their impact to the wider engineering mission.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, security, and customer-facing teams to align platform investments with business needs.
• Engage with technical leadership to ensure our infrastructure roadmap supports the broader company strategy.
• Translate future product and customer requirements into scalable, secure, and reliable platform capabilities.
• Act as a trusted partner to the VP of Technology and other senior leaders in shaping long-term platform vision.

We’d love to hear from you if…

• You have 5+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering.
• You’ve spent 1–2 years leading a team, with direct reports and ownership of complex, cross-team projects.
• You’ve built or worked on internal platforms and developer experience tooling.
• You’ve operated in small-to-mid sized SaaS companies—bonus points for B2B or API-driven businesses.
• You’re familiar with modern engineering practices like trunk-based development, infrastructure-as-code, service ownership, and feature flags
• You have solid backend engineering experience, ideally with TypeScript in production environments.
• You’re comfortable working with datastores like MongoDB (Atlas), ElasticSearch, and Snowflake.
• You understand distributed systems, observability best practices, and modern CI/CD workflows.
• You’ve built internal platforms or reusable services that support multiple teams or squads.
• You have a strong architectural sense, knowing when to scale, when to optimise, and when to keep things simple.
• You’re familiar with cloud infrastructure (especially AWS) and containerisation tools like Docker, ECS, or Terraform.
• You’ve worked in hybrid monolith/microservice environments or service-oriented architectures.
• You’ve led technical initiatives across engineers or teams and know how to drive cross-cutting projects.
• You bring a coaching-first leadership style, setting a high bar while supporting growth.
• You take proactive ownership of delivery, confidently setting timelines and communicating trade-offs.
• You’re skilled at turning vague business goals into clear, actionable platform priorities.
• You keep a keen eye on detail without losing track of the big picture.
• You have a bias for action and believe in iterating quickly and learning fast.
• You value clarity, transparency, and sharing context to drive aligned execution.
• You’re at ease in ambiguous environments and naturally bring structure where it’s needed.
• You care deeply about building an inclusive, curious, and driven engineering culture.
• You bring calm, confident leadership, especially when things get complex or high-pressure.

In-person and remote working balance ...

We have small HQ’s in Bristol & London (Holborn) with a growing team of people on the ground in our NYC office also.

Although our approach to hybrid working is flexible, priority for this role will be given to candidates who are available to travel to the Bristol office and keen to spend some days each month in a shared space partnering with the VP of Technology and wider engineering team on shared projects.

Why Duel

We want to build a remarkable company with remarkable people and a remarkable culture that you will want to shout from the rooftops about. In a relaxed, flexible, and fun environment, the team is driven to making the business a success while enjoying what we do and who we do it with.

We have a growing benefits package, including;

• Flexible working hours - if you need to fit around childcare or need to work around your life, we understand.
• Around 32 days of Annual Leave (28 excluding bank holidays and an extended break between Christmas and New Year, when we close the office). On-going training where required.
• Options scheme for all full-time employees - it’s important to us that everybody owns a part of the company and shares in the benefits of what we build.
• Company MacBook to work from
• Headspace Contributions
• Personal Development budget and support
• 2 additional days leave for volunteering