Engineering Lead

Jonas Fintech is a growing, profitable SaaS business at the heart of the UK payments market. We operate two established brands, Paygate and London & Zurich, delivering mission-critical Direct Debit and Bacs payment solutions that help businesses collect and manage recurring revenue at scale.

The business has been commercially strong. We know how to sell, how to retain, and how to grow revenue. What we are now doing is matching that commercial engine with the product and technology capability it deserves. We are investing deliberately in modernisation, moving toward a product-driven model, and embedding AI across how we build, operate, and compete.

This is a hands-on technical management role, reporting directly to the CTO. The right person will be equally comfortable running 1:1s and owning delivery rhythm, and writing tests, writing code as and where needed, and reviewing PRs with genuine technical depth.

You will lead on ways of working, AI adoption, QA automation and code review culture across the engineering function, working closely with technical team leads on technology choices and delivery.

• Lead on team practices, notably implementing lean/kanban across all teams, and help migrate those teams not currently in lean/kanban mode.
• Work with technical team leads on language, database and tooling decisions.
• Manage the day to day: 1:1s, blockers and delivery rhythm.
• Ensure all team leads are delivering against learning objectives, and run Show and Tells.
• Monitor delivery velocity across all squads and report to the CTO.
• Build and maintain automated test coverage, and set QA standards across the team.
• Provide SDET-level input into test architecture and automation frameworks.
• Own code review culture: standards, consistency and feedback quality.
• Work in tandem with the CTO to identify, pilot and roll out AI developer tooling across the team.

• SDET background or equivalent, having built automated testing frameworks, not just overseen them.
• Hands-on QA automation experience: Selenium, Playwright, Cypress or comparable tooling.
• Engineering management experience, having managed engineers, run 1:1s and been accountable for team delivery.
• AI adoption experience: has introduced AI developer tooling (Claude, Codex or equivalent frontier model) in a team context, not just personal use.
• Experience in fintech, payments, SaaS or a similarly regulated, delivery-focused environment.
• Familiarity with some of the languages and databases in use at JFT (C#.NET, VB.NET, Vue.js, MongoDB, Node.js, PHP/Laravel, Postgres, MSSQL, MySQL), with the willingness and ability to ramp quickly on the rest.
• Has introduced or improved code review culture in a previous role, with a vision of achieving software craftsmanship as a standard.
• Comfortable reporting directly to a CTO and delivering against the engineering vision with limited management overhead.

This is a remote contract. Please note that as with all of our colleagues across all of our business, there is an expectation to meet in person, around four to five times a year, at all-company town hall events and/or Vesta Group events. Travel expenses for these are covered by the company.

We believe that diverse teams build better businesses. Jonas Fintech is committed to an environment where everyone feels valued, heard, and empowered to do their best work. We actively encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups, and are committed to an accessible and inclusive hiring process throughout.

We are open to flexible working arrangements and will consider both full-time and part-time candidates. Please talk to us about what works for you.

Interested candidates should apply in confidence.