Software Engineering Lead

As crypto goes mainstream, so does crypto crime. At Elliptic, we create products that enable financial institutions, investigators, and crypto businesses to stay ahead of emerging threats. Our product Investigator is the industry standard for tracing illicit funds, empowering compliance teams worldwide to conduct faster and more effective investigations using the world’s most accurate crypto identity dataset. Its intuitive forensics visualize the flow of funds across blockchains with a single click, helping uncover meaningful evidence quickly and resolve criminal cases with fewer resources.

The impact you will have: As Lead of the Investigations team, you'll shape how compliance teams track fund flows and prevent financial crime. Working closely with the product, you'll help define the technical direction of the platform by turning complex blockchain data into simple, useful product features. You will lead an empowered team that takes full ownership of its technology stack and product domain. You’ll coach and develop high-performing talent, cultivate a culture of innovation and accountability, and collaborate across the business to deliver meaningful value to our users.

What you will do:

• Write and review code to unblock the team, demonstrate best practices, and pair with engineers to share knowledge and tackle challenging problems.
• Help your team make sound technical decisions by weighing trade-offs and choosing approaches that balance technical quality with business objectives.
• Work closely with Product and other stakeholders to make sure the team is focused on the work that matters most.
• Help team members find their own solutions by building problem-solving skills and creating a self-sufficient, resilient team.
• Provide system context and overviews to new team members, accelerating their onboarding and productivity.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, managers, and business stakeholders.

What You'll Bring:

• You’ve led or mentored a small engineering team (around 3–6 people).
• You have strong JavaScript and TypeScript skills across both backend (Node.js) and frontend (React) development, and you’re familiar with frameworks such as NestJS or Redux.
• You think architecturally, designing scalable UI applications and APIs, and you’re comfortable making informed decisions about technology choices and patterns.
• You have a strong delivery record, having led technical initiatives end-to-end while driving collaboration and maintaining high engineering standards.
• You communicate clearly, explaining technical ideas in a way that ensures alignment across engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders.
• You actively use AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) as part of your daily workflow, can critically evaluate AI-generated code, and understand when AI tools are useful and when they’re not.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with data visualisation, particularly libraries or tools for rendering network graphs or complex data flows.
• Familiarity with cloud technologies such as AWS Serverless, API Gateway, Kubernetes, or Terraform.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools like Datadog.
• Interest or experience in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology though we're happy to learn.

Don't Check Every Box? We know that some candidates are less likely to apply unless they meet every single requirement. If you're excited about this role and our mission but your experience doesn't perfectly align, we'd still love to hear from you. Diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and skill sets make our team and our product stronger. Ensuring that people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences feel welcome at Elliptic is an ongoing priority for us. We believe that diverse thinking and cultures enable us to solve problems in new ways by benefiting both Elliptic and our customers.

Job Benefits:

• Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year.
• £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space.
• $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development.
• Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays.
• An extra day for your birthday.
• Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave.
• Private Health Insurance - we use Vitality!
• Full access to Spill Mental Health Support.
• Life Assurance: 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries.
• Cycle to Work Scheme.