Lead Software Engineer

We're partnering with an ambitious London-based payments start-up looking to hire a hands-on Lead Software Engineer to help shape the next generation of their platform as they scale.

This is a high-impact opportunity for a senior engineering leader who enjoys operating across architecture, platform engineering, product delivery, and technical strategy in a fast-moving environment.

You'll play a key role in defining engineering standards, influencing product direction, and building scalable systems capable of supporting rapid growth within a modern payments ecosystem.

The Opportunity

Joining at an exciting stage of growth, you'll work closely with founders, product teams, and engineers to design and deliver a highly scalable payments platform using modern cloud-native technologies.

This role combines:

• hands-on engineering,
• technical leadership,
• architecture ownership,
• and mentoring responsibilities.

You'll be expected to remain close to the code while driving best practice across the wider engineering function., * Define and evolve platform architecture across mobile, backend, and cloud infrastructure

• Lead engineering design decisions and establish scalable development standards
• Build and optimise high-performance backend services using Node.js
• Drive mobile architecture and delivery using React Native
• Own AWS infrastructure strategy, scalability, reliability, and security
• Work closely with product and leadership teams to shape technical roadmap
• Champion engineering excellence, DevOps culture, CI/CD, and automation
• Explore and implement modern AI-assisted engineering tooling and workflows

We're looking for a strong technical leader with experience building scalable products within start-up or high-growth environments.

Essential Skills

• Strong experience with React Native
• Deep backend engineering expertise using Node.js
• Strong knowledge of AWS infrastructure and cloud-native architecture
• Experience working with PostgreSQL and scalable data design
• Proven experience operating at Technical Architect, Principal Engineer, or Staff Engineer level
• Experience building scalable distributed systems and APIs
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering best practices

Desirable Experience

• Payments, fintech, or regulated environment experience
• Exposure to AI-assisted development tooling such as Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar
• DevOps and infrastructure-as-code experience