Lead Engineer in Hythe

Salary: £74,126 - £92,658 FTE DOE + Benefits + Bonus

Location: Newingreen, Kent | Fully office based

We care deeply about inclusive working practices and diverse teams. If you’d prefer to work full‑time, part‑time or as a job‑share, we’ll facilitate this wherever we can - whether to help you meet other commitments or to help you strike a great work‑life balance.

About Holiday Extras, we’re creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, build their careers and reach their limitless potential. As a Sunday Times Best Place to Work 2025, we’re proud to offer a world of benefits designed to enhance your lifestyle and well‑being. By joining our team, you’ll feel supported and rewarded every day. We create seamless digital experiences that help travellers make the most of their trips. From the moment they book to the moment they fly, we remove hassle so they can focus on what really matters - their holiday.

Payments are a critical part of that journey. We're dedicated to building a frictionless, reliable checkout experience using Node.js and TypeScript at its core. In 2025 we made significant strides in our payment platform - including introducing alternative payment methods - and we’re continuing to evolve our architecture for scalability, reliability, and compliance. We’re also going all in on AI. We believe it will fundamentally change how we build and operate our products, and we’re investing across the business to make it a core part of how we deliver for customers. In this role, you’ll be encouraged to champion AI‑assisted tooling and automation within your team - finding smart, pragmatic ways to raise the quality and pace of what you ship.

The Role: This is a hands‑on technical leadership role with line management responsibility for a small team of engineers. You’ll combine deep backend expertise with the ability to develop, support, and grow the people around you - setting a high bar for quality while creating the conditions for your team to thrive. You’ll be leading a small, talented team of full‑stack engineers, many of whom have a strong frontend background. As AI reshapes how we build, we’re deliberately pivoting towards deeper backend capability - and a meaningful part of this role is guiding that shift. That means upskilling the team, setting the technical standard, and creating an environment where engineers are genuinely excited to grow.

By joining our team, you will:

• Lead and line manage a small team of engineers, owning their development, wellbeing, and performance.
• Define and champion best practices for Node.js and TypeScript backend development within the Payments team.
• Set the technical direction for our payment platform, making sound architectural decisions that balance innovation with pragmatism.
• Be the go‑to expert for complex payment problems - from integration challenges to compliance requirements like PCI‑DSS and Payment Services Directives.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Delivery, Finance, Fraud, and Data teams, as well as third‑party Payment Service Providers.
• Drive a culture of technical excellence, coaching engineers and fostering professional growth through mentorship and feedback.
• Champion AI tools and automation to increase team productivity and code quality - identifying where they can genuinely add value.
• Keep pace with the evolving payments landscape, surfacing opportunities and risks for the business.
• Represent your team’s work in regular stakeholder demos and updates.
• Balance delivery pace with long‑term sustainability, managing technical debt strategically.
• Dedicate 10% of your time to your own learning and development.

What You Can Bring to Our Team:

• Substantial experience in backend development, with expertise in building scalable, reliable, and secure systems using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Experience leading and line managing engineers - you understand what it means to be accountable for someone’s development and career progression.
• A track record of technical mentorship and helping engineers grow through feedback, pairing, and coaching.
• Strong knowledge of payment systems, including PSPs, alternative payment methods, PCI‑DSS, and Payment Services Directives.
• An outcome‑driven mindset - you can articulate how your work has improved key metrics for payment platforms.
• A pragmatic approach to technical decisions, balancing innovation with the need to keep things moving.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to adapt your style for technical and non‑technical audiences alike.
• Experience managing stakeholders across a range of teams and disciplines.
• A proactive attitude to identifying new opportunities and technologies that can enhance the platform.
• A genuine passion for sharing knowledge - internally through your team, and externally in the wider engineering community.
• Openness to adopting AI tools and practices where they add real value to how your team works.

Everyone's career path is individual and different, so this is just a guide. If your experience doesn’t precisely match this, you’re encouraged to apply so we can discover your unique talents!

How We Hire for This Role: We know your time is precious, so we keep our recruitment process as straightforward as possible. If we think you could be a match, you’ll move through these stages:

• Initial conversation with our Recruitment Lead - a chance to learn more about the role and tell us about yourself.
• On‑site interview with our Principal Engineers and Solution Architects, including a technical discussion and problem‑solving exercise.
• Meet the team - an informal opportunity to spend time with the people you’d be working with and get a real feel for the culture and environment.

Cultivating a diverse and inclusive culture is paramount for us. If you need us to adapt the process for any reason, please get in touch. We reserve the right to close this role before the closing date due to high application volumes. Please apply as soon as possible to be considered.

Why Choose Holiday Extras? We believe that holidays are the most precious time of all, so we create products, tech and services that make travel and holidays memorable and fun. We’re on a mission to be the only place to go for your holiday extras, offering unparalleled choice, value and service, turning our customers’ ordinary trips into extraordinarily good times. This role is based full‑time at our office in Newingreen, in the heart of the Kent countryside - just minutes from Folkestone and the M20, where face‑to‑face collaboration genuinely matters. You’ll find free parking, an on‑site café, and a state of the art campus that makes the commute worth it.

Time is precious: 25 days annual leave (+BH’s), extra holidays through Holiday Buy, Birthday Day Off, and Sabbaticals at each milestone. Parental Leave: Enhanced parental leave - Up to 1 year off, including 13 weeks at 100% pay, 13 weeks at 50% pay. Road to well‑being: Access to Gym Discounts, Private Dental Insurance and Private Medical Insurance (after 4 years). Celebrate success together: Enjoy a Profit Share Bonus and a pension scheme with Aviva. Good for the soul: Join our Social Club for 25 % off any ticket or event in the UK, Discounts on the latest tech, or give back to your community with our Volunteering Scheme. Plan ahead: Income protection, Critical illness cover and Life assurance.