Technical Lead (Frieze)

MARI is a global events and experiences company powering world-defining live experiences. Our portfolio of premium live properties spans sports, art, and entertainment — including the Madrid and Miami Open tennis tournaments, Frieze (a leading voice in contemporary art), and Barrett-Jackson (the premium U.S. collector car auction company). MARI also includes TodayTix Group, the global e-commerce leader for cultural experiences, connecting millions of customers with the best in live entertainment. MARI is reshaping the live events landscape — building a growing portfolio of category-defining events and brands that set the standard for what's next, across sports, entertainment, art, and lifestyle.

Frieze is an international media and events company based in London, with offices in New York and Berlin and a market-leading position within contemporary art. The fairs comprise Frieze London, Frieze Masters, Frieze New York, Frieze Seoul, Frieze Abu Dhabi and Frieze Los Angeles; publishing includes frieze magazine and other titles; and frieze.com is the day-to-day hub for the brand proposition and a destination for cultural consumers. Frieze has been a dynamic critical voice in contemporary art since 1991 and, since becoming part of the MARI group, continues to grow and develop the ambition to be a cultural brand of global influence.

Frieze has a small in-house development team working across our suite of digital platforms, collaborating closely with specialist agencies and partners. The Tech Lead will take ownership of the technical direction for our platforms, owning deliverables, architecture and engineering standards, and shaping the team's culture and ways of working - including mentoring and managing developers. Reporting to the Director of Digital, the Tech Lead is the most senior technical person in the company and combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You will work alongside the Product team, which sits within the wider Digital team, partner with external agencies, and collaborate closely with teams across Frieze - including Data, Marketing and VIP - to deliver against our roadmap. We are increasingly using AI tooling to improve development speed and workflows, and the Tech Lead will be expected to champion and embed these practices across the team. The role would suit an experienced developer who already leads or is ready to step up to leading a team - someone with the technical depth and ambition to shape technology strategy.

The technology stack at Frieze includes: a headless Drupal CMS with a Next.js frontend; PHP; AWS, Cloudflare, Heroku and Docker across hosting and infrastructure; SolarWinds for logging; a React Native mobile app; and GitHub. The Digital team works in Jira and Figma.

This is a full-time contract role and qualified candidates must be able to commute to Central London working from the office 2-days per week.

What You'll Own:

• Working alongside the Product team to translate product priorities into technical delivery against the digital roadmap.
• Driving technology strategy and planning together with the Director of Digital and the wider business.
• Working closely with teams across Frieze - including Data, Marketing, VIP and more - to understand their needs and deliver solutions that support their changing working practices.
• Supporting the technical aspects of the live fair events such as ticketing, access and reporting. This will involve some out-of-hours work and travel during fair time.
• Leading, mentoring and managing the in-house development team, and developing its culture, processes and ways of working (code review, testing, delivery practices).
• Managing relationships with agencies and partners, and coordinating work delivered in collaboration with them.
• Championing and embedding AI tools and workflows to improve development speed and efficiency across the team.
• Acting as the senior technical point of contact, translating technology for non-technical stakeholders and building broader understanding across the business.

What You Bring:

• At least three years’ experience leading a development team or acting as a technical lead - setting technical direction and standards and being accountable for delivery.
• Planning and delivering technical aspects of large projects with multiple stakeholders.
• Collaborating with product teams and managing or working alongside external agencies and partners.
• Strong experience in events, with the ability to work to hard deadlines.
• Confidence making and owning technical decisions in a fast-moving environment.
• Excellent problem-solving abilities.
• DevOps experience and ability to perform and problem solve under pressure, where required.
• Enjoys mentoring and coaching more junior developers, working with them to improve the quality of all deliverables.
• Excellent verbal and visual communication skills, influential at management level.

Technical skills:

• Modern, full-stack development, ideally with experience working with Next.js.
• RESTful API development, ideally with experience working with PHP.
• Server architecture and hosting management, ideally with strong knowledge of AWS, Cloudflare, Heroku and Docker.
• Logging and observability tooling.
• Development of automated testing and internal/external QA processes.
• AI-assisted development tools to improve speed and workflows, or a strong appetite to adopt them.
• CRM and/or marketing automation systems.
• Agile development practices.

Benefits:

• Hybrid work environment (blend of in-office and at-home days).
• Pension match and access to a bespoke pension scheme.
• Paid Parental Leave.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Enhanced gyms, wellness and financial wellbeing apps access via Wellhub.
• Flexible Paid Time Off.

MARI believes in the power of live experiences to unite people — and we know that can only be achieved when we reflect the full diversity of the world around us. As a global company that shapes culture across sports, art, and entertainment, we are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace and to practicing anti-discrimination across race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and beyond. We recognise that systemic inequality and discrimination remain challenges across the events and entertainment industry, and we are dedicated to driving meaningful progress — both within our own organisation and across the wider industry we are proud to be part of.