Tech Lead

Herdify; West of England; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Staff events

Office Bristol

Job summary

Herdify in Bristol is seeking a Tech Lead to build and lead a small development team (2-3 initially) and own delivery of our SaaS products. You will hire, shape the architecture, and guide frontend/backend/cloud practices across a Python/Linux stack, collaborating with Product/ML and the CEO.

This player/coach role starts hands-on with delivery and evolves into full team leadership, with occasional travel to London for staff events and offsites.

Qualifications

• Senior developer with tech lead or small team management experience.
• Experience hiring and onboarding developers.
• Able to manage your own workload and set priorities for a small team.
• Effective communication and collaboration across teams, inc. leadership.
• Experience in early-stage software development and building a team from an initial stage.

Responsibilities

• Define the hiring plan for the initial engineering team.
• Own technical interview process end-to-end including design assessments.
• Set engineering practices, standards and workflows from day one.
• Lead delivery of Python-based applications and features.
• Build a lightweight reporting function to communicate progress to leadership.

Skills

Python

Frontend experience

Linux

AWS

DevOps

Team leadership

Hiring & onboarding

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

FastAPI

Django

Docker

Kubernetes

SQL databases

MongoDB

DynamoDB

Terraform

Git

Job description

Full-time, 3 days a week in the Bristol office with occasional trips to the London office in Paddington for staff events and offsites.

About the role

Herdify is a B2B SaaS company that delivers behavioural science to consumer brands. After a period of growth, we’re building a dedicated software engineering team in our Bristol office and looking for a Tech Lead to build the team and own delivery of our SaaS products. Initially, this will be a 'player/coach' role until running the team becomes a full-time position. Your first priority will be to hire a small development team (2-3 people initially) and then lead that team in building out our SaaS platforms. While we don't expect you to be an expert across all technology domains, you should have significant experience across frontend, database design, cloud infrastructure and DevOps on AWS on a Python/Linux stack. You’ll report to the CEO and work closely with our Product/ML lead to turn roadmap and requirements into technical design and delivery, and with our Head of Engineering on infrastructure and deployment.

Team building (first 3-6 months)

• Define the hiring plan for the initial engineering team
• roles, capabilities, seniority
• Own the technical interview process end-to-end- design assessments, run technical interviews, make hiring decisions
• Set engineering development practices, standards and workflows the team will use from day one
• Get up to speed with the current environment and deliver updates and features as set by the product team.

Ongoing / once the team is in place

• Lead day-to-day delivery of Python-based applications, including design, development and testing.
• Build a lightweight reporting function to communicate progress to the leadership team on a monthly basis.
• Deliver features until such a time the team is big enough to warrant a full-time tech lead.

Non-technical experience

• Significant experience at senior developer level, including prior experience as a tech lead or managing a small team of developers
• Direct experience hiring and onboarding developers
• Able to manage your own workload and set priorities for a small team
• Effective communication and collaboration across teams, inc. leadership.
• Experience working in early-stage software, ideally having built a team from a similarly early stage.

We also value diverse experience outside the areas listed.

Technical responsibilities

• Own front-end architecture and quality and deliver best-in-class user experiences.
• Web server development using FastAPI
• Design and maintenance of NoSQL and SQL databases
• Data scraping/cleaning/processing using Python
• Own our Linux-based infrastructure and deployment strategy
• Containerisation of applications
• Use test-driven development to produce high-quality, well-documented, secure software
• Convert high-level product requirements into detailed technical designs, working directly with Product

Essential technical experience

• Strong Python across backend, web application, API, automation, CLI and data processing
• Comfort collaborating with non-technical stakeholders (marketers, product) on UX and design decisions
• Strong Linux for development, testing and deployment (desktop and server)
• Strong experience developing web applications using FastAPI (or Django, Flask, etc.)
• Good knowledge of AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2, ECS, Cognito, IAM, firewalls, load balancers, Route53)

Desired technical experience

• Strong front-end development
• a modern framework (React or Vue preferred), not just HTML/CSS/JS fundamentals
• Working with a variety of data formats (CSV, JSON, Parquet, etc.) at high volume and complexity
• Comfortable with NoSQL and SQL databases (SQLite and DynamoDB in particular), including moderately complex SQL
• Containerising applications with Docker/Docker-compose
• Git-based workflows
• Understanding of DevOps best practices
• Creating and querying REST APIs
• Use of IAM for internal and external users

Bonus points for

• Experience with data science libraries (pandas, numpy, geopandas)
• Experience with visualisation libraries (d3, folium, plotly etc.)
• Web development using htmx, Jinja2, Bootstrap
• Other container systems such as Podman
• Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation, Terraform etc.)
• Databases such as MongoDB, DuckDB

About Herdify

We’re in business to help organisations influence people’s behaviour for the long-term benefit of society. Our initial focus is working with marketing teams, but our aspiration stretches far beyond marketing and advertising. With our expertise in influencing human behaviour, we want to build a business that helps shape society positively and prevents nefarious uses of our technology.

Our Values

• 1. Not all money is good money. We don’t work with organisations that don’t align with our mission.
• 2. We want to do the right things by our customers and incentivise our teams to ma