Engineering Manager/Lead in Liverpool

TLA, an automotive marketing business founded 24 years ago, helps the world’s biggest car brands — Volkswagen, BMW, Ford and others — reach in-market buyers. Our consumer sites (Green.Car, Askaprice, Car Keys and more) capture and qualify hundreds of thousands of car-buying intents annually, and our platforms validate and route those leads to the brands that want them. We’re at an inflection point, rebuilding our consumer-facing platform from the ground up on a modern Node.js stack as an AI-first engineering function.

The role involves leading a small engineering team through the consumer platform rebuild — owning what the team delivers, how the team works, and how its engineers grow. You’ll be hands-on with the team day-to-day, ensuring the team has the right people, process, and environment to do their best work. You’ll need real technical depth to engage credibly with the problems the team is working on, even when you’re not the deepest expert in the room.

This is a role for someone who enjoys growing engineers and improving team dynamics. The engineering team is small and senior, and we’re in a deliberate hiring phase to grow it around the new platform and the AI-first practice.

The opportunity includes:

• A new consumer-facing platform well underway — foundational architecture in place, plenty still to build.
• An unusual opportunity to shape a team as it scales: how it hires, how it works, and how it develops.
• Rebuilding the engineering function itself as an AI-first one, with spec-driven development already core to our work.

What you’ll do:

• Own what the team delivers — accountable for the team’s output, and the bridge between the team and product and senior leadership.
• Grow the engineers on the team through 1:1s, feedback, mentoring, and active investment in career development.
• Stay hands-on technically — contributing code, reviewing designs, and bringing judgement and unblocking when needed.
• Shape and continuously improve how the team works — process, code review practice, deployment hygiene, rituals.
• Help deepen our spec-driven, AI-first practice — and lead by example in your own work.
• Help build the team — interviewing, onboarding, and contributing to hiring decisions.

What we’re looking for:

• Track record of leading and growing a small engineering team — with real experience mentoring engineers and investing in their career development.
• Strong technical depth — credible in our stack (Node/TypeScript with React/Next.js).
• Cloud experience — Azure ideal, AWS / GCP fine.
• Fluency with and genuine interest in how a team works — process, rituals, code review practice, deployment hygiene — and a track record of improving it.
• Considered judgement about technology choices — adopting new tools and patterns when they’re right, sticking with proven ones when they’re not.
• Demonstrated fluency with modern AI coding tools — and interest in helping the team build that fluency too.
• A strong product and business instinct — understanding why the team is building something, not just what.

Helpful experience includes:

• Helping a team adopt AI tooling as part of normal practice.
• Background in marketing tech, automotive, or consumer-facing data-rich businesses.

Where you’ll work:

We’re a Liverpool-based business with two days a week (Monday and Tuesday) together in our city centre office. The rest of the week is from home. For this role, we’re looking for someone within commuting distance of Liverpool. In-person design conversations matter, and we want our senior engineers in the room shaping the function as well as the code.

You’ll work closely with our product and engineering leadership team, along with the wider technology function.

We offer an annual training and conference budget, modern engineering tools, including paid licences for AI coding tools as standard, a cycle to work programme, and an active social calendar including charity sporting events.

This role is open only to candidates with the right to work in the UK without sponsorship, now or in the future.