Web Engineering Lead in Bristol

The Role

The Web Engineering Lead owns the technical direction, engineering quality and day-to-day health of the Web Technical Domain, the customer website and its suite of microservices, the platform through which students discover, book and pay for their home with us. It is one of the most commercially important technology estates at Unite Students, and this role is accountable for it end to end: from architecture and standards through to cost, security and live service.

This is a technical leadership role. You will lead through standards, patterns and influence rather than hierarchy: guiding multiple internal and partner squads who contribute to a shared, growing codebase, and holding all of them to a single definition of quality. Managing our engineering partners is central to the role.

You will join at a significant moment. Following an independent assessment of the web estate, we have a funded, Board-backed programme to rebuild our trading platform as a headless, multi-brand architecture with enforced engineering standards, real release governance and a newly established Design Authority behind it. You will be a visible leader in that change: shaping the target architecture, raising the quality bar, and making sure the platform holds through the trading windows that matter most. If you are motivated by making engineering measurably better, this is a rare amount of room to do it.

You will own the Web Domain, which includes:

• The customer website (Next.js) and its associated microservices
• The content platform (Contentful), Search (Algolia) and the integration of web journeys with our commerce, booking and account APIs.
• The domain`s own AWS account, including its cost, security posture and operational health
• The CI/CD pipelines, quality gates and release process for the domain

The domain consumes booking, pricing and account services through APIs; the platforms behind those APIs are owned by peer domains (Salesforce, Integrations), and you will work closely with their leads. This role covers the Web Domain only.

What You`ll Be Doing

• Domain leadership. Own the technical direction and roadmap of the Web Domain and represent it in enterprise settings.
• The platform rebuild. Lead the engineering of our next-generation trading platform: progressively decoupling marketing from booking and rebuilding the web estate and architecture on which each brand trades as a shopfront on a shared engine and onboarding acquired brands is configuration, not a new stack.
• Engineering quality. Own the quality and process behind everything the domain ships. Define and maintain quality and security gates, set the standards, principals and a DORA baseline you measurably improve.
• One standard, every squad. Maintain a single Definition of Done that applies equally to internal and partner squads, with evidence at release gates. Hold partner-delivered work to it, including the authority to decline work that does not meet it and to shape quality requirements in partner statements of work.
• A coherent codebase. Lead the web engineering practice: author the patterns, reference implementations and reusable components that keep a growing, multi-team codebase consistent and supportable, and coach squads in using them.
• Live service. Own the reliability of the website as a trading channel: service level objectives, observability, incident and problem management with a learning-focused, blameless culture.
• The AWS account. Own the domain`s AWS account and running services within an agreed budget envelope.

What We`re Looking for in You

You do not need every item below, if you have a strong combination of these, we would like to hear from you.

• You have designed and delivered large-scale, public-facing web platforms in an enterprise environment, and you have led a significant re-architecture, for example decoupling a monolith or moving to a microservice / micro-frontend architecture.
• You have set and upheld engineering standards across several teams, and can describe how you made quality measurable. Code Review processes, DevSecOps Practices and Gated release to production.
• You have managed third-party engineering partners to a defined quality standard, and can give examples of holding the line when delivered work fell short.
• You are deeply experienced in a strong combination of: TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, React or Next.js, RESTful and GraphQL APIs, headless CMS, and AWS, including running production workloads and understanding what they cost.
• You have owned live services: observability, incident and problem management, and change control on systems where downtime costs money.
• You build security in. Least privilege, secure coding, and working openly with security teams on risk
• You use AI-assisted engineering tools in your own work and have a considered view on where they help, where they do not, and what controls they need
• You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences, and can gain support for engineering decisions in governance settings - architecture boards, risk forums, senior stakeholders

Room for Everyone

We`re proud to be an employer that embraces individuality, and we`re passionate about building inclusive teams. We focus on creating a collaborative culture where you can be you, where your voice is heard, and where you can truly belong. We take great pride in being rated Gold Investors in People and are constantly striving to provide the highest standard of learning and development opportunities and professional pathways for our people. Building a home for success, for both our employees and students, requires exceptional people. Join us as we build better experiences for students that live with us.

We are US.