Engineering Tech Lead - Platform Capability

Want to lead a team without giving up the code? We’re looking for a Tech Lead to head up our Capability squad. Capability owns the shared foundations of ECA’s multi-tenant B2B SaaS platform, the back-end services every other product team builds on. This isn’t a role where “Tech Lead” means spending your week in meetings and updating spreadsheets while you drift away from engineering. You’ll lead a team of developers, set technical direction and own the quality of what the squad ships. You’ll also stay hands-on, writing code, reviewing it and working through the hardest problems yourself. Increasingly, you’ll also help us answer a bigger question: what does a genuinely AI-first engineering team look like? What you’ll be getting stuck into Capability is where our platform’s non-functional requirements live. If our services are slow, insecure, fragile or hard to operate, every product team feels it. Your squad makes sure they aren’t. You’ll own areas such as: Identity and access management: authentication, SSO, roles and permissions, built on KeycloakTenant isolation and multi-tenant data architecturePlatform services and integrations that other squads depend onPerformance, scalability, resilience, security and observability across the platformYou’ll work mainly in Node.js and TypeScript on AWS, with PostgreSQL behind it, and you’ll help shape how the platform evolves as the business grows. You’ll also: Lead, mentor and grow a squad of developers while staying close to the codeTreat non-functional requirements as part of the design from the start, not something to deal with before go-live: performance budgets, availability, security, auditability, operability and costDesign and build back-end services and APIs that are scalable, maintainable and secure in a multi-tenant environmentOwn technical direction for the platform foundations and help define what “good” engineering looks like across ECAWork closely with Product, Delivery and the other squad leads to turn requirements into sound technical solutions, especially where the work cuts across teamsGive realistic estimates and challenge optimistic ones when neededStep into difficult or stalled work, work out what’s blocking it and get delivery moving againRaise the bar on testing, including TDD, automated testing, and load and performance testingMake sure what your team builds is observable and supportable in production, and help run incident response and learning when things go wrongUse AI throughout the software development lifecycle, from design and build through to testing and reviewHelp shape how AI coding agents fit into our engineering workflow, including the guardrails, review standards and governance that make them safe to use on platform-critical codeRequirements What we’re looking for You’ll probably have 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong back-end bias. We care more about what you’ve built, led and improved than about the number of years. You’ll need strong hands-on experience with: Node.js | TypeScript | SQL (ideally PostgreSQL) | API design | Cloud-hosted distributed systems You’ll understand what it takes to run a multi-tenant SaaS platform in production. You’ll be able to explain the trade-offs between tenancy models, design for horizontal scale, reason about failure modes, and know where caching, queuing and asynchronous processing help and where they hurt. Non-functional requirements should come naturally to you. You’ll have defined, measured and improved things like latency, throughput, availability and security posture, and you’ll know how to make them visible through logging, metrics and tracing. Identity and access management experience is particularly important: SSO, OIDC, SAML, OAuth, authentication and authorisation, RBAC, tenant isolation, and tools such as Keycloak. Above all, we’re looking for someone who combines technical depth with leadership. You can make a difficult architectural decision, explain it clearly, unblock an engineer and still get stuck in when the situation calls for it. You’d rather unblock three engineers than be the hero on one ticket. You’ll also need to be eligible to work in the UK. Even better if... You’ve worked with some of the following: AWS (ECS/EKS, Aurora), Terraform, GraphQL, event-driven or workflow-orchestration patterns, observability tooling, React, .NET Core or C#. If you’ve built or hardened authentication and authorisation for a SaaS product with enterprise customers, we’d love to hear about it. And if you’re already experimenting with AI IDEs, coding agents or AI-assisted development, and have opinions on how to use them responsibly on critical code, we definitely want to hear about it. Benefits ECA is evolving its technology and products, and this role sits right in the middle of that journey. You’ll have the opportunity to influence how we build, how we deliver and how we use AI within engineering, rather than simply inheriting a finished playbook. So, if you’re a strong Full Stack engineer who enjoys leading people, solving difficult platform problems and still actually building things, this could be a very interesting next move. You'll also receive - 💼 Enhanced Stakeholder Pension Contribution🌴 25 days annual leave🏥 Health, Life Insurance + EAP Wellbeing Support💰 Eligible for Annual Bonus Scheme🎉 Long Service Awards🏋️‍♀️ ClassPass Membership👶 Enhanced Family Leave📚 Up to £1,000 per year for personal development & training🚆 Season Ticket Loan🏠 Flexible/hybrid Work Environment🚲 Cycle to Work Scheme👓 Free Eye Test