Lead Software Engineer in Cardiff

Creditsafe has been making business information accessible since 1997. Today we help companies of every size - from sole traders to the FTSE 100 - make smarter decisions about who to trust, who to sell to, and who to work with. Our Data Cloud team is where that data is turned into something the rest of the business and our customers can rely on.

Creditsafe’s Data Cloud is a platform most people never see, but most businesses worldwide indirectly depend on: billions of records, tens of millions of daily updates, along with the capability of managing customer portfolios over highly scalable APIs. This is not a management role. It’s the technical leadership rung on our IC ladder, with the scope and compensation to match.

What you’ll own:

• A technical domain, not a single service. You’ll be the engineer who knows how a slice of Data Cloud works end-to-end — and where it’s going next.
• Architecture and strategy. Drive multi-quarter technical roadmaps: what we build, what we retire, and what we stop doing. Author the RFCs that matter.
• Cross-team decisions. Partner with two or three engineering teams, Product, and Data Science to make the right technical trade-offs — especially the ones no single team can make alone.
• Quality of the whole. Reliability, performance, cost and security for your domain. When an incident touches your area you’re part of the postmortem.
• Engineering standards. Set the bar for design reviews, API contracts, testing and operability — and teach it, so it sticks.
• Hands-on work. We expect you to still ship code — typically the hard bits, the de-risking prototypes, and the reference implementations others build on.
• Mentorship at scale. Grow Seniors into the next Staff engineers. Coach Engineering Managers on technical direction. Be generous with your time.

Experience and Skills:

Must-haves:

• Deep experience building and running production systems in Python on AWS — typically 8+ years of engineering, with at least a couple of those operating at a Staff/Principal scope.
• A track record of leading systems not just features. You can point to platforms or services you designed whose decisions still hold up under load, change and time.
• Strong judgement on trade-offs. Cost vs. latency, build vs. buy, consistency vs. availability, velocity vs. debt — and you can explain your reasoning in a room of non-engineers.
• Demonstrable technical influence across teams, not just within one. RFCs, guilds, shared libraries, architecture forums — something that shows your reach.
• A mentoring habit. Named engineers whose careers moved because of your input. You already enjoy this work.
• Excellent written communication. Your docs, RFCs and postmortems teach people things. This matters as much as your code.

Nice to have:

• Rust in production, or experience taking a team on that journey.
• Deep AWS data-platform chops: Redshift, Glue, Athena, Iceberg/Parquet, lakehouse patterns.
• High-throughput serverless design with auditability and exactly-once semantics.
• Experience owning a domain that spans 3+ teams or 10+ engineers.
• Financial, credit or regulated-data background.

How we work:

• IC ladder with teeth. Staff is a destination, not a waypoint - with scope, comp and influence that genuinely match the title.
• Written design culture. Anything non-trivial gets an RFC. Decisions are recorded. We disagree in documents, not in meetings.
• Real operability. We run what we build. No hand-offs to a separate ops team.
• Pragmatic agile. Teams own their own process. We optimise for shipping, not ceremony.
• Leadership you’ll want to work with. Engineering leadership is technical, present, and will back your calls.
• Company Laptop supplied. Bonus Scheme. Cycle to work and Wellbeing Programme. Global Company gatherings and events. E-learning and excellent career progression opportunities.

Creditsafe is an equal opportunities employer that values diversity. Please contact Creditsafe if there is any support you need with your application.