Lead Software Engineer

The role in brief

• A hands-on technical lead, working as part of a small development team.
• Most of your week is spent designing, writing, reviewing and shipping code.
• You lead the engineers you work alongside and work directly with the CEO.

About us

Rest Less is a social impact business with a mission to help and inspire today’s generation of people over 50 get the most from life.

With over 1 million registered members across the UK, we bring together advice, inspiration and opportunities across work, money, travel, health, lifestyle and more. We also champion age-inclusivity and challenge outdated stereotypes of this large but chronically overlooked and under-represented audience.

Technology underpins how we serve our members and create value for our commercial partners. From helping people discover relevant content, jobs and holidays to delivering intelligent, personalised communications and measuring campaign performance, the quality of our platform directly affects our business.

About you

You’re an experienced engineer who has been the technical lead for a small team while still writing a lot of the code yourself. You like being the person who makes the technical call, and you’re just as happy pairing on a bug, reviewing a pull request or picking up the tricky ticket nobody else wants.

You make pragmatic decisions. You know when to build, buy, improve or simplify, and you can weigh reliability, security and cost against what the business needs this quarter.

You explain trade-offs to non-technical colleagues in plain language, bring structure to ambiguous requests, and help the engineers around you get better at what they do.

The role

You will be the technical lead for our engineering team, working directly with the CEO, who sets the business priorities. You will own how we meet them: the architecture, the day-to-day technical decisions and the standards we build to. You will spend the majority of your time hands-on.

What you will do

• Build. Design, write, test and ship code across our TypeScript, Python and PHP services.
• Lead the engineering work. Break work down, plan it, keep it moving, review code and unblock the team.
• Own the architecture. Make and record technical decisions, and recommend what to build, buy, modernise or retire.
• Set the standards. Evolve how we test, review and deliver, and hold the team (and yourself) to them.
• Protect data quality. Keep the pipelines behind our client reporting accurate and healthy.
• Keep things running. Own monitoring and incident response, and take part in the on-call rota.
• Keep us secure. Look after access management and patching, and support penetration testing and Cyber Essentials.
• Watch the costs. Keep an eye on AWS and supplier spend and flag savings.
• Use AI well. Shape how the team uses AI tools to move faster without lowering quality or security.
• Develop engineers. Mentor through pairing and code review, and help hire when we need to.
• Work with the business. Turn requests from commercial, content and client teams into well-scoped work, and keep people informed on progress and risks.

What we’re looking for

• Strong commercial experience building backend services in TypeScript (Node.js) and/or Python, with code you wrote shipped to production in the last 12 months.
• Experience as the technical lead for a team of engineers (formal title or not) while remaining a hands-on contributor.
• Production experience on AWS, ideally serverless and containers (Lambda, ECS, SQS, SNS, EventBridge).
• Confidence with SQL and relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL).
• Infrastructure as code (AWS CDK or Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience being on-call and handling production incidents.

Nice to have

• PHP and WordPress.
• Data tooling such as AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, Athena or Airbyte.
• Search (Algolia) or customer engagement platforms (Blueshift).
• Cyber Essentials or similar security compliance work.

Our platform

A modern, cloud-native platform on AWS that you can shape, not just maintain. It powers what we offer our audience and our partners:

• Content. Our website and the tools, articles and guides our audience comes to us for.
• Travel. Holidays and travel deals from our partners, gathered automatically and curated in-house.
• Jobs. Job listings and search, connecting our audience with employers.
• Partnerships and advertising. Campaigns for our brand partners, with tracking and monthly performance reporting that shows them the value they get.

Behind it sit our customer engagement platform, which drives the emails our audience receives, a data platform that keeps our reporting accurate, the internal tools our colleagues run the business with, and a cloud setup built on infrastructure as code, automated delivery and observability.

Our stack

Languages - TypeScript (Node.js), Python, PHP, SQL

Cloud - AWS: Lambda, ECS, EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, SNS, SQS, EventBridge

Data - MySQL, PostgreSQL, S3, AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, Athena, Airbyte

Search - Algolia, Google Talent Solution, Vertex

Customer engagement - Blueshift

Analytics and reporting - Metabase, Google Analytics

Monitoring and on-call - CloudWatch, Grafana, PagerDuty

Infrastructure and delivery - AWS CDK, Terraform, Cloudflare, Bitbucket Pipelines

Front end - React, WordPress

Salary range - £85-95k based on skills, experience and suitability for the role.

If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you...