Team Lead (Engineering) - London in Kennington

About Fresha

Fresha is the leading AI-powered operating system for the global beauty and wellness industry, giving businesses everything they need to run smarter, grow faster and build stronger client relationships.

The full job description covers all associated skills, previous experience, and any qualifications that applicants are expected to have. In May 2026, Fresha secured an $80M growth investment from KKR at a valuation of $1B, officially reaching unicorn status and bringing total funding raised to $285M. Already profitable, Fresha is using this investment to accelerate global expansion and drive the next generation of AI and product innovation.

Today, Fresha operates at global scale, with offices across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Our platform is trusted by 130,000+ beauty and wellness businesses across 120 countries, with more than 1.5 billion appointments booked to date. Our mission is simple: help beauty and wellness businesses grow by giving them the technology they need to attract clients, manage their operations and run their business in one place. We're continuing to scale rapidly across markets, teams and products, making this an exciting time to join us.

Role Overview

Team Lead (Engineering) | The Bower, 207-211, Old St, Tower, London EC1V 9NR | Four days in office, Wednesdays remote We're looking for a hands-on Team Lead. You'll report to the Head of Engineering and work closely with your Product Manager and the Staff Engineers. You own your team's technical direction, planning and delivery. Teams here are small, usually 2-5 engineers plus a Product Manager. We keep them that size so the lead can stay hands-on and know everyone well.

Your team owns its part of the product end to end, including how it runs in production. The team that builds a service looks after it, including a shared on-call rota. Staff Engineers work across teams and help when a problem needs more than one team to solve it. We're moving every engineer towards full stack, leads included, and you'd help your team make that move.

You're accountable for how your team performs: it delivers what it commits to, gives reliable estimates, flags changes early, and builds things that are well architected and run well in production. You're also the line manager for everyone on it. We use AI as much as we can. Every engineer gets Claude, Codex or Cursor from day one and builds their own agent workflows. It's still evolving, and you'd help shape how your team uses it.

What You'll Do

Technical leadership and delivery Mentor and give technical guidance from your own system design and coding experience.

Make trade-offs with the whole system in mind.

Write code, fix bugs and work through issues alongside your team.

Keep your team's services healthy: decent test and monitoring coverage, postmortem actions that actually get done, and tech debt raised before it becomes a problem.

Know the architecture of your area well enough to explain where its scaling and reliability limits are.

Take on work that brings value to the wider engineering org, beyond your own team.

People leadership Run your team:

You know what each person is working on, where they're stuck, and how they're doing, and you step in quickly when someone is struggling.

Expectations:

Make sure everyone on the team knows what's expected of them.

Feedback:

Give it when it happens, not saved up for reviews.

Growth:

Help your engineers grow, and make the case for them when they're ready for the next step.

Hiring:

Interview for your team and hold the bar on who joins.

Onboarding and team health:

Help new joiners get up to speed quickly, and keep a team where problems surface early.

Our stack:

services in Ruby, Elixir and TypeScript, React and TypeScript on the web, and native mobile apps in Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android. What We're Looking For

Hands-on first:

This is a highly technical role. You still write code, review it, and hold your own in design discussions. If you've moved away from building and don't want to come back to it, this isn't the role for you.

You've led a team:

Formally, or as a senior engineer people already followed. We hire both experienced leads and strong engineers stepping up for the first time.

Delivery:

You've led a team that ships reliably, and you notice early when a plan is slipping.

System design and architecture:

Proven experience in system design, coding and architecture, with a track record of delivering large systems in multiple languages. Ideally you can architect what your team needs yourself, with Staff Engineers there to help when a problem calls for it.

Process:

You're good at spotting where a team's process is slowing it down, and fixing it.

Problem breakdown:

You're good at taking a messy problem, splitting out what's known and unknown, and getting to a decent answer fast.

Lead by example:

Ownership, quality, proactiveness, continuous improvement, product focus, bias to action, culture of open feedback.

At Fresha, we value passion and potential as much as specific skills. If you're enthusiastic and eager to learn, we encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet every listed requirement. Your Opportunity at Fresha

Scale:

Around 1 million bookings a day across 120 countries, and the payments that go with them, running on a platform we're breaking out of its monoliths while it serves traffic.

Ownership:

The tooling, data and permissions to run what your team builds, and the technical calls for your area.

Interview Process

Screen Call

- Video call with a member of the Talent Team (30min)

1st Stage

- Technical video/in-person interview with our engineers (90min)

2nd Stage

- Technical video/in-person interview with our engineers (up to 2 hrs)

Final Stage

- Leadership and people management with the Head of Engineering & CTO (60min)

Inclusive Workforce At Fresha, we are creating a culture where individuals of all backgrounds feel comfortable. We want all Fresha people to feel included and truly empowered to contribute fully to our vision and goals. Everyone who applies will receive fair consideration for employment. We do not discriminate based on race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristic in the location in which the candidate is applying.

If you have any accessibility requirements that would make you more comfortable during the interview process and/or once you join, please let us know so that we can support you. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information.

These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. xbpsjku Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.