Lead Software Engineer
London | Hybrid | Permanent
We are working with an established technology-led organisation that is continuing to invest in its digital products and engineering capability. They are looking for an experienced Lead Software Engineer to take a senior hands-on role within the team, combining software delivery with technical leadership and architectural input.
You will work across complex, high-availability applications and services, helping to design scalable solutions while supporting engineers through the full development lifecycle.
The organisation is also increasingly incorporating AI-assisted engineering into its development processes, making this an interesting opportunity for someone who has already explored how AI tooling can improve areas such as development, testing, documentation and technical design.
The Role
You will take ownership of technically complex work, collaborating closely with product and engineering colleagues to turn requirements and early-stage ideas into robust production solutions.
Your responsibilities will include designing and developing scalable backend services and APIs, contributing to architecture and system design, improving engineering standards and supporting reliable software delivery.
You will also provide guidance to other engineers, participate in technical decision-making and help identify opportunities to improve performance, maintainability and platform resilience.
We are looking for experience across:
Building and operating large-scale web applications or online services within production environments.
Designing RESTful APIs, microservices and distributed systems, with exposure to gRPC advantageous.
Strong software engineering fundamentals covering system design, testing, performance and operational reliability.
Working with relational and NoSQL technologies such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB or Redis.
Using AI-assisted development tools as part of a professional software engineering workflow.
Mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership through design, development and delivery.
Experience with cloud-native environments across AWS, Azure or GCP, container technologies, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code would be beneficial. Exposure to event-driven architectures, messaging technologies, real-time data processing or search platforms would also be useful.
Previous experience integrating AI or large language model capabilities into customer-facing products would be an advantage, although this is not essential.
We are looking for an engineer who combines strong technical judgement with a pragmatic approach to delivery. You will be comfortable taking ownership of complex problems, working closely with product stakeholders and helping engineering teams make well-informed technical decisions.
This is an opportunity to remain genuinely hands-on while having significant influence over architecture, engineering practices and the continued development of a modern software platform.
Apply now to cv@franklinbates.com for consideration.