Engineering Lead

Who are Picnic & what do we do? Picnic’s mission is to drive a higher quality ad-funded internet. Today, a large proportion of digital advertising is ineffective, intrusive and poorly optimised. Picnic builds technology that helps brands make better decisions about where and how their advertising is shown - improving outcomes for users, advertisers and publishers alike.

We’re a fast growing, founder-led startup. Over the last couple of years, we’ve built a strong platform foundation and developed clear conviction around our product direction. We’re now entering a new stage where execution, reliability and scale matter as much as innovation.

To support this next phase, we’re looking for an Engineering Lead - someone who can take end-to-end ownership of technical delivery, system evolution and platform quality.

What will you be doing as Engineering Lead? As Engineering Lead, you’ll report to the Chief Product & Technology Officer and take ownership of Picnic’s technical execution - ensuring we build reliable, scalable, production-grade systems as the platform grows. This is a hands on technical leadership role, focused on engineering excellence, architecture and delivery.

• Own execution of the engineering roadmap, taking optimisation and decisioning capabilities from prototype through to dependable production systems
• Provide technical leadership across platform infrastructure, data pipelines, applied modelling, real-time services and APIs
• Act as an architectural steward of the platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, performance and cost efficiency as complexity increases
• Drive best practices around system design, DevOps, observability, automation, CI/CD and production operations
• Ensure high standards around service guarantees, data freshness, versioning and operational correctness, especially as the platform becomes customer facing
• Stay close to the systems and codebase, making key technical decisions and unblocking execution across the stack
• Help evolve the platform to support external customers and partners with clear expectations around uptime, latency and trust

This is not a pure people management role - the focus is on building strong systems, raising engineering standards and delivering high quality technical outcomes.

Who are we looking for? We’re looking for an experienced, pragmatic technical leader - someone who has built and operated complex systems in production and wants broad ownership over platform execution.

• Have strong hands on experience delivering systems in a startup or scaleup environment
• Be deeply experienced in cloud architecture, particularly within AWS
• Have worked across product engineering, platform infrastructure and data systems
• Have built and operated production services with high requirements around reliability, latency, correctness and cost control
• Be confident designing systems that balance short-term delivery with long term maintainability
• Be comfortable moving from experimentation into robust production deployments
• Have strong judgement around trade offs, technical debt and operational risk
• Be familiar with machine learning concepts and the infrastructure required to deploy and run models in production
• Communicate clearly with technical and non technical stakeholders

Some team leadership experience is welcome, but the core requirement is technical strength, execution ownership and engineering excellence. Experience in advertising technology is a bonus, but not required.

You’ll be joining Picnic at a pivotal moment - where strong engineering execution can materially shape the trajectory and value of the business.

At Picnic:

• You’ll have real ownership over platform direction and technical decision making
• You’ll work closely with the founder and leadership team to translate strategy into reliable systems
• Ideas move quickly from concept to production - we value momentum, quality and impact
• You’ll help build a platform used by external teams and systems to make high-value decisions at scale

What can Picnic offer you? We’re proud to have been recognised by Culture100 and Flexa as one of the best and most flexible small businesses to work for. We offer:

• Flexible, hybrid working setup (with regular time together in our London Bridge office)
• 33 days holiday (inclusive of Bank Holidays), plus additional Christmas shutdown
• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality
• Picnic pension contribution
• Inclusive parental leave policy
• A great co-working space, regular socials and offsites, Picnic Thursdays, Summer Fridays, and 'Work from Roam' opportunities