Lead Full Stack Engineer | Full Stack & MySQL Engineering | FinTech with a Mission
- Location: Remote-first with 1 day per month in Bristol, all travel and/or hotel paid for
- Salary: £80k – £90k (up to £95k for a rock star) Bonus
- Cool thing: 6 weeks per year nomad work policy. Work from anywhere in the world for 6 weeks per year
Help build products that change lives. At this purpose-led FinTech scale-up, over a million people have already used the platform to grow savings, boost credit scores, and build financial literacy. Now they’re looking for a hands-on Lead Developer to take technical ownership of one of their core product areas and lead a distributed team to the next level of engineering maturity.
The Role
As the sixth Lead Developer in a 36-person engineering org (2/3 offshore in India), you’ll step into a full-stack role focused on code quality, delivery standards, and data sanity. The product sees 400 new users a day and handles terabytes of data, but the current monolithic MySQL setup is bloated, slow, and costly to query.
- Lead a team of 4–6 engineers (front-end, back-end, QA – UK and India-based)
- Be accountable for their output, mentoring, and development standards, NOT HR duties, holiday booking, disciplinaries etc., your manager, the CTO, will do that
- Write and enforce clean, scalable front-end and back-end code
- Champion improvements to data access and modelling (SQL optimisation, schema refactors, and exploring storage alternatives)
- Own one area of the product and steer it like it’s yours (note: area may evolve)
- Collaborate with the CTO and other leads on wider architectural decisions
What They’re Looking For
- 3 years minimum experience in leading teams
- Full-stack capability: experience in any of PHP, .NET, Java or similar, plus JS/TS front-end
- Strong SQL/data layer fundamentals, query optimisation, schema design, and indexing. Our client uses AWS Aurora, but any MySQL experience will be OK.
- Comfortable mentoring and guiding teams, enforcing quality, and owning delivery
- Able to collaborate across functions and time zones
What You'll Work With
- PHP & Laravel
- JavaScript/TypeScript React on the front end
- AWS Aurora, auto-scaling Kubernetes, and microservices in a single cluster
- One giant MySQL database with millions of rows (your mission: reduce it by 1/3)
- Laravel is doing too much of the heavy data lifting (and hiding bad DB queries!) So you’ll look to improve that
- Modern DevOps toolchain, with opportunities to influence infrastructure cost and performance
Key objectives/things you’ll fix in this role:
- Improve our client’s legacy MySQL database, which is at the heart of the product, currently oversized, slow, and expensive to query, with Laravel abstracting away the SQL layer and limiting visibility into how data is fetched.
- A system that doesn’t store or move data in complex ways, but spends much time shepherding it around, you’ll take ownership of improving how data flows through the application.
- Hands-on SQL work, writing and optimising queries directly, rethinking data access patterns, and exploring alternative storage approaches to improve performance.
- A Laravel-based stack where the ORM handles modelling but obscures efficiency, you'll help cut through that abstraction to improve both performance and maintainability.
- This role spans architecture and optimisation, not just writing queries, you’ll guide the team in refactoring how the product interacts with data and ensure best practices across backend and front end.
Why Join?
- Mission-led product used by 100k active members
- Empowering culture with low bureaucracy and high autonomy
- Freedom to focus on tech, CTO handles the admin
- Bristol HQ trips fully expensed, including hotel stays pre/post visit
- Be part of a mature, collaborative engineering culture without egos or fluff
Benefits:
- Annual bonus equivalent to one month’s salary.
- 6 weeks per year nomad work policy. Work from anywhere in the world for 6 weeks per year
- £500 personal life fund for personal or professional development.
- 25 days holiday, bank holidays, birthday off, and variable Christmas closure.
- Monthly socials and bi-annual company get-togethers.
- Enhanced parental leave package.
- Employee reward scheme including telephone GP, free counselling, and high street discounts.
Lead Full Stack Engineer | Full Stack & MySQL Engineering | FinTech with a Mission
