Tech Lead - Shared Backend Services

As Tech Lead for Funnel Platform, you will guide the team behind shared backend services and frameworks that power iwoca’s lending decisions. You stay hands-on while steering design, production, and improvements that other engineering teams rely on. You will shape technical direction with input from customer-journey leaders and mentor two engineers. This role combines leadership with hands-on code, focused on reliable, scalable services that speed up cross-team work. You’ll work in a fast-moving fintech culture that embraces AI and data-driven decisions to support SMEs at scale.

• Flexible working hours
• Medical insurance from Vitality
• Private GP service for family
• 25 days holiday plus birthday day
• Sabbatical after 4 years
• Employee equity incentive scheme

• Own the team’s existing and new backend services from design to production
• Define and enforce engineering standards for design and testing of shared services
• Review contributions from other teams and shape their usage of shared services
• Improve reliability and speed of the services used by customer journey teams
• Use data to persuade stakeholders to back shared-service work
• Line-manage and mentor two engineers, guiding project leadership
• Collaborate with customer journey leaders to set priorities in the absence of a product manager
• Drive architectural decisions for distributed backend systems
• Evaluate and integrate AI-driven improvements where they add value
• Maintain focus on simplicity and maintainability of shared codebase

• Technical leadership as a tech lead for around two years with hands-on coding
• Experience building and running backend services or frameworks used by other teams
• Proficiency in at least one backend language with experience designing distributed systems in production
• Ability to identify real problems from user input and set priorities in the absence of a PM
• Experience using AI to augment delivery, with ability to review AI outputs before deployment

• Leadership and people development
• Strong cross-team collaboration
• Data-driven decision making
• Backend engineering with distributed systems design
• One in-depth backend language
• Python and Django (bonus)