At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead engineering teams, ensuring accountability and driving transformation in a dynamic environment.
- Company: Join OnCommerce, a forward-thinking company focused on modernising engineering practices.
- Benefits: Competitive salary up to £100k, equity options, 25 days leave, and career development opportunities.
- Other info: Be part of a culture that values ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by balancing live operations with innovative platform evolution.
- Qualifications: Strong full-stack engineering background and proven people leadership experience required.
The predicted salary is between 100000 - 100000 £ per year.
- Product Engineering Ownership & Accountability
- Define and enforce clear ownership boundaries across the engineering team, by domain (Buyer / Seller / Platform), holding every contributor accountable regardless of sourcing model (permanent or partner-led)
- Track and report Throughput and Instability per domain, so standards are visible and enforceable, not aspirational
- Transformation Continuity
- Hold delivery consistent through every point of disruption the transformation introduces: nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain moves, headcount change
- Partner with the Transformation Lead to ensure structural change doesn't degrade live delivery
- Standards & Engineering Governance
- Own the engineering standard across both the current platform and the target state
- Review the Transformation Lead's roadmap for engineering-standard and operational impact before commitments are made
- Own how modern and legacy architecture coexist during migration, guarding against legacy practices and assumptions leaking into the new platform
- People Leadership & Team Engagement
- Lead and develop engineering capability across squads (including Dev Ops and platform functions)
- Coach and support Tech Leads to build consistent leadership standards across teams
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
- Identify capability gaps and support hiring, development, and succession planning
- Own resource planning, including capacity, skills mix, and on-call structure
- Operational Resilience & Incident Ownership
- Establish and run a two-tier resolver model: Ops on-call for standard support and runbook-driven issues, Product Engineering (Buyer/Seller) as the resolver group for genuine engineering problems
- Build rota depth (minimum 3 engineers per domain, or full team where smaller) so resolution doesn't depend on any one individual
- Drive a genuinely blameless Post-Incident Review culture, building on the existing Incident Management SOP
- Security & Risk
- Embed secure coding practice, SAST/DAST scanning, and OWASP-aligned standards into the engineering definition of done
- Surface security risk in business terms (exposure, cost to fix vs cost to carry) and route it to the appropriate decision-maker, rather than carrying risk-acceptance decisions unilaterally
- Technical Debt Management
- Identify, log, and manage technical debt within day-to-day delivery
- Escalate strategic trade-offs (rebuild vs patch, roadmap sequencing) to the Solution Architecture Lead, owning visibility and routine remediation rather than the strategic call
- Delivery & Execution
- Work with Product Owners (Buyer and Seller) to translate roadmap items into scoped, sequenced engineering execution
- Own technical design and implementation choices day to day, operating within established architectural patterns without requiring sign-off for routine work
- Escalate to Product Owner Heads where scope or trade-off decisions sit above the Product Owner's remit
Essential
- Strong full-stack engineering background with Laravel/PHP, comfortable across monolith and microservices patterns
- People leadership: hiring, mentoring, performance management
- Direct experience leading an engineering transformation, restructuring teams, process, or architecture, while keeping a live, revenue-generating platform running throughout
- Strong API design and system architecture experience
- Production experience with My SQL, Couchbase or Mongo DB, and Redis
- GCP, deploying and operating live services at scale
- Experience balancing legacy support against parallel investment in a target architecture
- Startup or scale-up experience, comfortable operating with ambiguity and limited resource
Desirable
- Has lived through a MACH or composable architecture migration on a live, trading platform, not greenfield, and carries the scars: knows where the pain actually shows up (data consistency across services, search/catalogue re-platforming, vendor lock-in regret)
- Multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic experience, enough to have an informed, opinionated view on GCP versus alternatives rather than default loyalty to whatever's currently in place
- Comfortable working beyond PHP where the future stack calls for it (e. g. Node. js, Go, Python)
Role Overview
This is a senior leadership role accountable for the day-to-day performance and long-term evolution of On Commerce's engineering function, spanning both the current platform and its transformation to a modern, composable architecture.
The Engineering & Operations Lead owns engineering delivery, operational resilience, and standards across all squads, ensuring strong processes translate into reliable services, predictable delivery, and high-performing teams.
Working alongside the Transformation and Solution Architecture Leads, you will balance live operations with platform evolution, ensuring neither stability nor progress is compromised.
Success in this role requires leading people, setting clear expectations, and driving accountability for outcomes, while making effective trade-offs between short-term delivery and long-term sustainability.
Compensation & Benefits
The salary on offer for this role is up to £100k per annum depending on experience.
- Company Equity – In return for helping us to grow, we'll offer you company equity
- 25 days annual leave + Bank Holidays
- 1 extra day off for your Birthday
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Perks at Work benefit platform
- Opportunities for career development and progression
- #J-18808-Ljbffr
Engineering & Operations Lead in Bournemouth employer: OnBuy Limited
OnCommerce is an exceptional employer that prioritises employee growth and development, offering a dynamic work culture where accountability and continuous improvement are at the forefront. With competitive compensation, including company equity and generous leave policies, employees are empowered to thrive in their roles while contributing to the transformation of a cutting-edge engineering function. Located in a vibrant area, OnCommerce fosters collaboration and innovation, making it an ideal place for those seeking meaningful and rewarding employment.
