At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead a product-focused engineering squad and drive technical excellence across platforms.
- Company: Join a pioneering connected commerce marketing company with a vibrant culture.
- Benefits: Enjoy a competitive salary, wellbeing fund, flexible working, and extra days off.
- Other info: Embrace change and grow with a diverse, values-driven team.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in a fast-paced environment while mentoring and leading talented engineers.
- Qualifications: Extensive software engineering experience and strong leadership skills required.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
Location: 1-2 days per week in the London office
Level: Senior Manager
Who are we?
We’re the original pioneers in connected commerce marketing. Since 2008, we’ve been partnering with major retailers, powering global brands, and building meaningful connections with shoppers.
About the role
As a Technical Lead at SMG, you will lead a product-focused engineering squad while providing cross-platform architectural leadership across SMG’s product engineering organisation. You will own system and delivery decisions for your team’s platforms, ensure resilient cloud deployments and operational excellence, and partner with other Technical Leads to define, govern and evolve consistent technical standards, operational practices, and tooling across SMG. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will design and validate architecture, unblock and mentor engineers, ensure the team delivers high-quality, secure, observable and cost-efficient product outcomes, and directly line-manage engineers, including mentoring, performance reviews and career development.
What you’ll do
- Work closely with the Product team to refine requirements and prepare them for specification through iterative discovery and grooming sessions.
- Ensure the engineering team produces clear, fit-for-purpose technical design specifications in a variety of formats (architecture diagrams, technical design specs, API specifications, data matrices/spreadsheets). Provide templates, guardrails and review cycles so designs are consistent and development-ready.
- Play an active role in the platform re-architecture: help plan how we will scale platforms to meet future growth and new business models.
- Oversee development and help unblock technical challenges by contributing code, participating in debugging and joining design pairings. Act to enable engineering autonomy and rapid delivery.
- Ensure our codebase follows best practices and establish high-quality code patterns, shared libraries and reusable components to reduce duplication and increase consistency. Lead by example in code quality through code reviews and hands-on contribution.
- Conduct technical and architectural reviews that are light, time-boxed, and constructive to validate that designs are robust, maintainable, secure, and aligned with SMG Technical Principles. Use reviews to coach engineers and to make iterative improvements.
- Help drive delivery reliability and operational excellence: ensure CI/CD pipelines are defined, Infrastructure as Code is used where appropriate, deployment patterns (feature flags, canary/blue-green) are available, and observability (metrics, logs, traces), automated alerts, runbooks and post-incident reviews are in place.
- Ensure production readiness for releases, working alongside the QA Lead to define pragmatic testing strategies and rollout plans; partner with SREs to optimise cost, scalability and platform resilience across SMG’s platforms.
- Embed Security-by-Design into technical decisions: threat modelling, least-privilege IAM, secrets management and compliance controls, in partnership with Security and Data teams.
- Work closely with other Technical Leads to agree and adopt best practices, tooling and patterns across squads; participate in cross-lead forums and steward SMG Technical Principles and Standards to maintain consistency across platforms.
What we’re looking for
- Extensive software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership in product engineering squads (senior engineer/tech lead responsibilities)
- Hands-on technical delivery: proven ability to design, review and deliver frontend user interfaces and backend services, APIs and integrations; comfortable contributing code and leading code reviews.
- Experience working with Product teams to translate product goals and objectives into clear engineering work, acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes.
- Experience in line-managing or directly mentoring engineers
- Deep knowledge of TypeScript and/or JavaScript and related frameworks, including React and Node.js.
- Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL or equivalent).
- Experience operating services in public clouds (familiarity with AWS and/or Azure) and ability to design cloud-agnostic solutions.
- Knowledge of containers and orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent).
- Experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, SLOs, runbooks and incident response; able to drive measurable reliability improvements.
- Familiarity with threat modelling, least-privilege IAM, secrets management and encryption practices; able to embed security considerations into design and delivery.
- Experience supporting or planning multi-cloud environments (e.g., AWS/Azure) and knowledge of cloud cost optimisation. (desirable)
- Experience in B2B SaaS or Retail Media (desirable)
We're looking for people who enjoy the buzz of change, the satisfaction of building something better, and the joy of working with a close-knit, values-driven team. If you love variety, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and embrace change with energy, this could be your right role.
Don’t meet every single requirement? We still want to hear from you. If you believe you’d thrive in this role, your unique perspective might be just what we’re looking for.
Why SMG?
At SMG, we hire for the future, which is fast-moving and changing shape. Do you have the potential to help shape our business? We’re looking for brilliant, diverse talent who want to grow with us - people who are curious, ambitious, and eager to learn, whether as specialists or across teams.
We value those who take ownership of their growth and bring fresh perspectives. That’s why we’re committed to equity, inclusion, and building a place where everyone feels empowered to grow. At SMG, it’s not just about filling a role but building the future together.
- 10% discretionary bonus
- £1,800 yearly wellbeing fund (on top of your salary!)
- Free Headspace subscription
- £500 yearly “Uni Fund” for learning
- 4 extra Wellbeing Days off per year
- Annual Summer conference + year-round celebrations
- 4pm finishes every Friday
- Flexible and hybrid working
Explore all our benefits here
Useful Links Before You Apply
- Learn about our agencies
- Our values
- Our hiring process
- EDI at SMG
- FAQs
- Our full data retention policy can be found here.
Technical Lead in London employer: SMG
At SMG, we pride ourselves on being an excellent employer by offering a supportive work culture that values your skills and contributions. With flexible scheduling and the opportunity to make a real difference in the community through our partnerships with local housing charities, you will find meaningful and rewarding employment while enjoying opportunities for personal and professional growth in Gloucester.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Technical Lead in London
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at SMG or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to SMG.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like SMG.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like SMG that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Technical Lead in London
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at SMG.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at SMG and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at SMG
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If SMG uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
