Lead Platform Engineer

JOIN OUR JOURNEY

Medialab is the UK’s leading independent media agency, and one of the fastest growing in the industry. We’re a media agency that’s made differently: purpose-led, data-driven, founder-run and proudly independent. Our entrepreneurial spirit means success is recognised and rewarded. There are no limits to what you can achieve here, which our employees agree with, evidenced by being a Campaign Best Place to Work for six consecutive years and one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2025. As well as this, we’re Campaign’s Independent Agency of the Year 2024 and Media Week’s Independent Agency of the Year 2025. We are IPA Effectiveness accredited, an IPA People-First agency, and All In Champions, with industry-leading work recognised by double-gold at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards for our work with Laithwaites and a 2025 Effie for our work with Alzheimer’s Society. Our independence means we can focus 100% on doing the right thing to secure success for our clients and our brilliant people. We work with a wide variety of clients including Hovis, IG, Sharps Bedrooms, SunLife, Standard Life, Ancestry, Laithwaites Wine, Save the Children, Guide Dogs, Alzheimer’s Society, RNLI and Clearscore.

OUR VALUES

• Commit to Doing the Right Thing (Act with integrity and accountability)
• Help People Flourish (Invest in people)
• Dig Deeper to Understand Better (Data driven curiosity)

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

Working at Medialab comes with lots of perks including all the usual things you would expect, such as a competitive salary package, pension, season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, weekly social events and big summer / end of year parties. On top of that, we offer extra benefits, which make life at Medialab even more rewarding:

• Time to Unwind – We offer generous holiday entitlement that increases with long service, plus Christmas closure and a birthday day off. Alongside this, we offer flexible benefits including a holiday buy scheme, flexi-hours, a work abroad scheme, cultural bank holiday swaps, and Friday Summer hours.
• Hybrid Working – Balance between home and office (3 days in office). We welcome requests for flexible working arrangements from the commencement of employment.
• Career Growth – A meritocratic approach to progression with quarterly reviews, CPD Platinum accredited training, mentoring and leadership support.
• Health & Wellbeing – Private medical insurance, health cash plan, gym discounts, wellbeing apps Mental Health First Aiders and unlimited free professional counselling.
• Supporting Families – Enhanced parental leave, flexible working and life assurance.
• Giving Back – Paid charity days and sustainability initiatives.
• Perks & Rewards – Retail discounts, long-service trips and an unforgettable team culture.

YOUR NEXT CHALLENGE

As the senior technical lead responsible for the non-data foundations of Apollo – Medialab’s marketing intelligence platform, the Lead Platform Engineer will play a critical role in shaping how we build, ship and operate software across the business. This is a new, senior and highly influential role within the Engineering team. You will sit alongside our Lead Analytics Engineer as an equal-seniority counterpart, owning the platform, application and developer-experience side of Apollo, while working closely with the Head of Data & Engineering on overall architecture and long-term direction. We’re looking for a hands-on, Python-first engineer who enjoys operating at both strategic and implementation levels: writing production code, setting standards, making technical decisions, and creating an environment where other engineers can do their best work. This is not a JavaScript-led “full-stack” role but you should be comfortable building user-facing applications and unafraid of frontends.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

• Platform & Application Engineering
  • Accountable for the technical quality, structure and evolution of all non-data components of the Apollo platform.
  • Responsible for leading the design and development of our core applications and internal tools, including multiple production UIs built using Python-centric stacks (e.g. FastAPI, Jinja, HTMX, Tailwind).
  • Responsible for making and guiding implementation decisions across backend services, APIs and application architecture.
  • Contribute directly to production code, setting the standard for quality, readability and pragmatism.
  • Accountable for overall security, ensuring the platform, applications, infrastructure and developer workflow follow best-practice security guidelines and evolve in line with standards, including working with our innovation team to ensure a secure approach to AI assistants and agents.
• Infrastructure, CI/CD & Developer Workflow
  • Accountable for the health, reliability and scalability of Apollo’s infrastructure and deployment pipelines.
  • Responsible for shaping and maintaining our CI/CD processes, testing strategy and release workflows.
  • Responsible for ensuring local development, build and deployment workflows are efficient, repeatable and well-understood.
  • Proactively identify opportunities to simplify tooling, reduce friction and improve developer productivity.
• Technical Leadership & Decision-Making
  • Act as the primary technical decision-maker for platform and application work, consulting with the Head of Data & Engineering on architectural direction.
  • Responsible for conducting thorough code reviews and ensuring all platform-side changes meet our quality bar before merging.
  • Provide day-to-day technical leadership to senior engineers, with offshore engineers accountable into this role.
  • Responsible for balancing delivery with sustainability, ensuring technical debt is visible and actively managed.
• Engineering Standards & Best Practice
  • Accountable for adherence to engineering standards across platform codebases, including testing, documentation and code organisation.
  • Responsible for evolving those standards over time, protecting core principles while adapting to new tools and approaches.
  • Ensure appropriate observability, logging and error-handling patterns are in place across applications.
  • Responsible for ensuring documentation exists where it adds long-term value, and remains accurate.
• Problem Solving & Collaboration
  • Accountable for identifying, communicating and resolving complex technical problems across the platform.
  • Responsible for fostering a culture of clear thinking, calm debugging and fixing root causes rather than symptoms.
  • Collaborate closely with analytics engineers, product stakeholders and users to ensure platform capabilities support real needs.
  • Act as a visible ambassador for Apollo’s engineering discipline across the wider business.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING TO THE ROLE

Must Have Skills

• Significant experience as a senior or lead software / platform engineer, with a track record of owning systems end-to-end.
• Deep proficiency in Python, including building production APIs, services and applications.
• Experience building user-facing applications, even if frontend is not your primary specialism.
• Strong understanding of modern backend architecture, infrastructure and cloud-native systems.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows and test strategies.
• Confidence making technical decisions and standing behind them, while remaining collaborative and open to challenge.
• Proven experience leading other engineers through code review, coaching and technical direction.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with a methodical and pragmatic approach to debugging and system design.
• Comfort working in evolving environments where priorities change and ambiguity exists.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience with FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and cloud platforms.
• Familiarity with lightweight frontend approaches (e.g. server-rendered HTML, HTMX, utility-first CSS).
• Experience supporting data-heavy or analytics-driven platforms.

At Medialab we are committed to fostering a culture that celebrates creative thinking, different perspectives and the many different cultures that exist. We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds and identities. All qualified applicants will receive fair consideration, regardless of age, disability, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, belief, marital status, social mobility or any other protected characteristic. If you require any reasonable adjustments to make our recruitment process more accessible for you, please reach out to our Head of Talent Acquisition and Inclusion. Requesting a reasonable adjustment will not affect your application.