Tech Lead - New Customers Team

iwoca; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Medical insurance

Private GP service

25 days' holiday + birthday day off

Company equity incentive

Sabbatical after four years

Counselling and therapy access

Pension contributions

Parental leave

Nursery tax benefit

Electric car scheme

Two company retreats

Job summary

iwoca is seeking a Tech Lead to guide two engineers and own the engineering roadmap for the customer journey from application to lending. You will migrate offer logic from a legacy monolith into distributed services, while leading the team and collaborating with data scientists.

You will design services, ensure reliability, and drive experiments and growth. The role combines hands-on coding with hiring and coaching as iwoca scales.

Qualifications

• Lead a team of engineers and own the engineering roadmap.
• Design services turning models and rules into lending decisions.
• Collaborate with data scientists from prototype to production.

Responsibilities

• Shape what the team builds and decide deployment order.
• Architect scalable backend services and data interfaces.
• Build experiments and long-running tests with data scientists.
• Line-manage engineers and grow the team’s capabilities.
• Migrate legacy logic out of a monolith while preserving functionality.

Skills

Technical leadership

Backend engineering

Python

Communication

AI leverage

Tools

Python

Django

PostgreSQL

Job description

You'll lead two engineers and report to the head of engineering for iwoca's customer journey, from first application to repeat lending., As the Tech Lead, you'll spend most of your time building. The team is moving its offer logic out of a legacy monolith into multiple services.. The next phase is yours to lead.

Responsibilities

• Autonomy and ownership. You'll shape what the team builds, decide how to build it, and own what goes live. You'll set its engineering roadmap, including what to pull out of the monolith, what to rewrite, and in what order.
• Technical depth. You'll design the services that turn the team's models and rules into a lending decision for each application. You'll keep them reliable in production and easy to change as the models evolve.
• Experimentation and learning. You'll build the systems that let data scientists test new models on live applications. Some experiments run for years, until each loan reaches the end of its term. You'll see the long-term results of the team's lending decisions.
• Leadership and growth. You'll line-manage and coach the team's engineers, setting context and helping them own projects end to end. As the team grows, you'll decide the skills and make-up it needs, and hire the engineers to match., Lending or payments experience. You've worked in lending, payments, or another domain where engineering decisions carry financial risk.
• Experimentation. You've built systems that run controlled experiments, especially long-running ones.
• Legacy migration. You've moved business-critical logic out of a complex legacy monolith and kept everything that depends on it working.
• Working with data scientists. You've worked with data scientists from prototype to production, and know their work well enough to challenge it.
• Python stack. You've worked with Python, Django, and PostgreSQL.
• Frontend. You've built frontend features as well as backend services.

Essential Requirements

• Technical leadership. You've led a team of engineers for at least two years, including line management, while still remaining hands on.
• Backend engineering. You have deep expertise in at least one object-oriented language. You've designed, built, and run customer-facing backend systems in production.
• Commercial or product thinking. You take a business goal, get to the root of what's needed and why, and turn it into a technical plan. You can explain a trade-off in terms of what it means for customers and the business.
• AI leverage. You've built agentic workflows, or used AI to deliver engineering work you couldn't have done alone. You help your team do the same. You judge where it's useful. You check its output before it reaches production.
• Communication. You write and speak clearly, directly, and concisely. You adapt technical detail to your audience.

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don't wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that's as flexible and responsive as they are.

That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed. We've already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

The team The New Customers team owns everything from a business's first application to a funded loan: the application flow, the logic that routes each application, the documents we ask customers for, and the models that set loan amounts and pricing. Its measure of success is the customer lifetime value it adds between sign-up and first loan. The team sets its own goals and direction. It brings together engineers, data scientists, and product and strategy people. It partners closely with credit risk on the trade-offs behind every lending decision. Knowledge sharing is central to how the team works, supported by regular forums to share findings, and dedicated research and development time.

At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective. We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.

The offices

• Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.
• Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.
• We expect to pay from £90,000 to £120,000 for this role.

Benefits

• Flexible working hours.
• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.
• 25 days' holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.
• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.
• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.
• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.
• An employee equity incentive scheme.
• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.
• Two company retreats a year: we've been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

Learning and development

• A learning and development budget for everyone.
• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Useful links

• iwoca benefits & policies
• Interview welcome pack (TAP)