Team Lead, Applied AI (London)

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. 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:

We're looking for a Team Lead for Agent Infrastructure, a team of Applied AI Engineers whose users are Fresha's own engineers. This is a hands-on role. You'll write code, review designs and build agents yourself, because you can't lead this work well from a distance. Every engineer at Fresha already has Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. Those tools make one engineer faster, but they don't make the organisation ship more on their own: they don't know Fresha, they have no safe way into our systems, and they can't tell whether a change is right for us. Agent Infrastructure builds that missing layer: shared context, scoped access, the evals and checks that prove a change is right, and the plumbing that lets work be handed to an agent instead of supervised. The aim is simple to state and hard to do: proddev ships more, and ships it right. Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, you'll be accountable for the team's technical direction, delivery and impact. That means deciding what the team builds and what it buys, turning a fast-moving field into a plan the team can execute, and showing with evidence that engineering ships more because of it. You'll lead the team, and be accountable for its performance: work is well-architected, estimates are reliable, communication is proactive, and what ships gets used. How the role balances leading people with building is something we'll shape with you. We care more about finding the right person than about fitting a fixed shape of Team Lead.

Direction and Delivery

• Build alongside the team: you'll own pieces of the platform yourself, not just review other people's.
• Own the team's roadmap: which bets to make, in what order, and when to stop.
• Keep up with the vendors. Know what Claude Code, Codex and the rest are shipping, and change course when something we planned to build becomes something we can turn on.
• Make sure the team's projects land on time and get adopted. A tool engineers don't use hasn't shipped.
• Understand the platform end to end and be able to explain clearly its limits on scale, reliability, security and cost.

Leading the Team

• Set a high bar for engineering quality in a field where demos are easy and reliable tools are hard.
• Set ambitious yet achievable goals, and make sure everyone understands their responsibilities and what good looks like.
• Mentor and give technical guidance on agent architecture, evals and platform design, drawing from your own hands-on experience.
• Build a culture of measuring, not guessing: every bet the team makes has a way to tell whether it worked.
• Lead from the front on our engineering practices, including how the team uses agents in its own work.

Adoption and Impact

• Work closely with product tribes, Team Leads and Staff Engineers across engineering to find where their time goes and turn that into the team's priorities.
• Define and report how the team's impact is measured, such as delivery, defect rates and the share of work agents complete and get approved. Be honest when the numbers don't move.
• Partner with Security and Platform teams so agents reach production systems through access that is scoped, audited and revocable.
• Explain the team's work clearly to senior stakeholders, up to the CTO and CEO.

This list is not exhaustive and there may be other activities you are required to deliver.

What we are looking for

• This is a highly technical and hands-on role.
• Proven experience in system design, coding, and architecture, with a track record of successfully delivering large systems in multiple languages.
• You've built and shipped production systems on LLMs or agent frameworks, and you know the difference between a convincing demo and a tool engineers can rely on.
• A working understanding of evals for non-deterministic systems, context engineering (retrieval, tool design, MCP, skills) and the security model of agents that act on real systems.
• A platform or developer-tooling background: you've built things whose users are other engineers, and you've had to win their adoption.
• You've had to quickly break down complex problems into potential solutions, knowns, and unknowns to reach a solid resolution faster.
• Comfortable making build-versus-buy decisions in a field that changes every few months, and changing them when the facts change.
• Lead by example (ownership, quality, proactiveness, continuous improvement, product focus, get things done, 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. We believe in fostering growth and providing the support you need to excel in your role.

Interview Process

• Screen Call - Video call with a member from the Talent Team - 30 minutes
• 1st Stage - Technical Video call/In-person interview with our Engineers - 90 minutes
• 2nd Stage - Technical Video call/In-person interview with Engineers, including agent and platform design - Up to 2 hours
• Final Stage - Video call/In-person meet with Head of Engineering & CTO - 60 minutes

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 characteristics 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, analysing 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. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.