Technical Lead Engineer: Shape Architecture, Deliver Quality

Elsevier; City Of London; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Country-specific benefits

Wellbeing initiatives

Job summary

Elsevier is seeking a Technical Lead to steer a cross-functional squad, balancing hands-on development with leadership through influence. You will shape technical direction, drive delivery planning, and collaborate with Product, Architecture, QE, SRE/Platform teams to deliver secure, scalable software solutions.

You will translate product objectives into strong designs, maintain quality through automated testing and security checks, and uphold agreed definitions of ready and done.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading through influence across design, delivery, and operations.
• Strong track record in distributed services, data platforms, or high‑throughput apps.
• Advanced knowledge of Agile/Lean practices, backlog refinement, and risk-based planning.
• Experience with test strategy, automation, CI/CD quality gates, and release readiness.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the first line of technical escalation for the squad’s services/components.
• Facilitate team ceremonies with a focus on flow and outcomes.
• Translate product objectives into sound technical designs and implementable stories.
• Design and implement complex features; fix bugs and improve performance.
• Define and uphold readiness/done criteria including code quality, tests, security, and observability.
• Establish/maintain CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, and branching/release strategies.
• Drive quality strategy: test pyramid, contract tests, data management, and environments.
• Partner with SLOs, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-incident learning.

Skills

Tech leadership

Distributed services

Agile/Lean

Test automation

Java/JVM

JavaScript/TypeScript

Python

C/C++

Tools

CI/CD platforms

Containers

Cloud technologies

Job description

Elsevier is seeking a Technical Lead to steer a cross-functional squad, balancing hands-on development with leadership through influence. You will shape technical direction, drive delivery planning, and collaborate with Product, Architecture, QE, SRE/Platform teams to deliver secure, scalable software solutions.

You will translate product objectives into strong designs, maintain quality through automated testing and security checks, and uphold agreed definitions of ready and done.