Technical Lead Engineering · London ·

Location: 1-2 days per week in the London office
Level: Senior Manager

Who are we?

We’re the original pioneers in connected commerce marketing. Since 2008, we’ve been partnering with major retailers, powering global brands, and building meaningful connections with shoppers.

We simplify the mind-boggling complexity of today’s retail media landscape. We deliver impactful campaigns that connect with people where it matters. We create seamless and personalised shopping experiences. Above all, we deliver amazing results for our partners, driven by our unshakeable desire for growth. Time after time, we change the game. SMG is home to a world-class suite of commerce advertising capabilities powered by data and cutting‑edge technology. We constantly push ourselves, our tech and our industry to discover innovative new ways to connect, sell and grow.

About the role

As a Technical Lead at SMG, you will lead a product-focused engineering squad while providing cross‑platform architectural leadership across SMG’s product engineering organisation. You will own system and delivery decisions for your team’s platforms, ensure resilient cloud deployments and operational excellence, and partner with other Technical Leads to define, govern and evolve consistent technical standards, operational practices, and tooling across SMG. This is a hands‑on leadership role: you will design and validate architecture, ensure the team delivers high‑quality, secure, observable and cost‑efficient product outcomes, and directly line‑manage engineers, including mentoring, performance reviews and career development.

What you’ll do

• Work closely with the Product team to refine requirements and prepare them for specification through iterative discovery and grooming sessions.
• Ensure the engineering team produces clear, fit‑for‑purpose technical design specifications in a variety of formats (architecture diagrams, technical design specs, API specifications, data matrices/spreadsheets). Provide templates, guardrails and review cycles so designs are consistent and development‑ready.
• Play an active role in the platform re‑architecture: help plan how we will scale platforms to meet future growth and new business models.
• Oversee development and help unblock technical challenges by contributing code, participating in debugging and joining design pairings. Act to enable engineering autonomy and rapid delivery.
• Ensure our codebase follows best practices and establish high‑quality code patterns, shared libraries and reusable components to reduce duplication and increase consistency. Lead by example in code quality through code reviews and hands‑on contribution.
• Conduct technical and architectural reviews that are light, time‑boxed, and constructive to validate that designs are robust, maintainable, secure, and aligned with SMG Technical Principles. Use reviews to coach engineers and to make iterative improvements.
• Help drive delivery reliability and operational excellence: ensure CI/CD pipelines are defined, Infrastructure as Code is used where appropriate, deployment patterns (feature flags, canary/blue‑green) are available, and observability (metrics, logs, traces), automated alerts, runbooks and post‑incident reviews are in place.
• Ensure production readiness for releases, working alongside the QA Lead to define pragmatic testing strategies and rollout plans; partner with SREs to optimise cost, scalability and platform resilience across SMG’s platforms.
• Embed Security‑by‑Design into technical decisions: threat modelling, least‑privilege IAM, secrets management and compliance controls, in partnership with Security and Data teams.
• Work closely with other Technical Leads to agree and adopt best practices, tooling and patterns across squads; participate in cross‑lead forums and steward SMG Technical Principles and Standards to maintain consistency across platforms.

What we’re looking for

• Extensive software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership in product engineering squads (senior engineer/tech lead responsibilities)
• Hands‑on technical delivery: proven ability to design, review and deliver frontend user interfaces and backend services, APIs and integrations; comfortable contributing code and leading code reviews.
• Experience working with Product teams to translate product goals and objectives into clear engineering work, acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes.
• Experience in line‑managing or directly mentoring engineers
• Deep knowledge of TypeScript and/or JavaScript and related frameworks, including React and Node.js.
• Hands‑on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL or equivalent).
• Experience operating services in public clouds (familiarity with AWS and/or Azure) and ability to design cloud‑agnostic solutions.
• Knowledge of containers and orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent).
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, SLOs, runbooks and incident response; able to drive measurable reliability improvements.
• Familiarity with threat modelling, least‑privilege IAM, secrets management and encryption practices; able to embed security considerations into design and delivery.
• Experience supporting or planning multi‑cloud environments (e.g., AWS/Azure) and knowledge of cloud cost optimisation. (desirable)
• Experience in B2B SaaS or Retail Media (desirable)

We're looking for people who enjoy the buzz of change, the satisfaction of building something better, and the joy of working with a close‑knit, values‑driven team. If you love variety, thrive in a fast‑paced environment, and embrace change with energy, this could be your right role.

Don’t meet every single requirement? We still want to hear from you. If you believe you’d thrive in this role, your unique perspective might be just what we’re looking for.

Why SMG?

At SMG, we hire for the future, which is fast‑moving and changing shape. Do you have the potential to help shape our business? We’re looking for brilliant, diverse talent who want to grow with us - people who are curious, ambitious, and eager to learn, whether as specialists or across teams.

We value those who take ownership of their growth and bring fresh perspectives. That’s why we’re committed to equity, inclusion, and building a place where everyone feels empowered to grow. At SMG, it’s not just about filling a role but building the future together.

10% discretionary bonus

£1,800 yearly wellbeing fund (on top of your salary!)

Free Headspace subscription

£500 yearly “Uni Fund” for learning

4 extra Wellbeing Days off per year

Annual Summer conference + year-round celebrations

4pm finishes every Friday

Flexible and hybrid working

Explore all our benefits here

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