Engineering Lead

Job Description

Pets deserve the best, and we're building it.

We work with evolving tools and expect our engineering team to as well, AI-assisted development is part of how we build, not a separate initiative.

If you've led complex digital delivery before, care deeply about engineering quality, and know how to get the best out of distributed teams while operating with a strong sense of ownership and accountability, this role is for you.

What you will be doing:

• Leading technical delivery across our e-commerce, mobile, backend, and integrations landscape, across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Making the architecture calls that matter; frontend, backend, mobile, cloud, with a bias toward modular, API-first, headless designs, and owning the outcomes.
• Designing and overseeing scalable headless commerce architectures and distributed systems.
• Guiding technical direction across Node.js, NestJS, React, and React Native; writing code when it matters, not as a default.
• Managing outsourced engineering agencies and holding them to the same engineering standards and delivery cadence as the in-house team; not just tracking tickets, but owning delivery.
• Running sprint execution, release coordination, and technical planning across concurrent initiatives.
• Working closely with Product, UX/UI, QA, and Operations to ship things that actually solve problems.
• Supporting integrations across e-commerce platforms, ERP, OMS, payment gateways, CRM, loyalty systems, and third-party operational platforms.
• Ensuring engineering best practices across CI/CD, code quality, testing, monitoring, observability, security, and deployment automation.
• Surfacing and retiring technical risk, scalability bottlenecks, and technical debt proactively, not reactively.
• Contributing to engineering process improvements, platform reliability, and long-term architecture evolution.

What you bring:

• 7+ years in software engineering, with at least 2–3 years in a technical leadership or engineering management capacity.
• Hands-on engineering experience is a must. You've written production code recently and you're comfortable jumping in when needed.
• Comfortable working with AI-assisted development tools as part of your regular workflow and able to set the standard for how the team uses them effectively.
• Strong hands-on experience with Node.js, NestJS, React, React Native, and TypeScript.
• A strong foundation in headless commerce, API-driven architecture, and distributed systems.
• Real e-commerce experience. You understand the full picture: customer journeys, payments, OMS, fulfillment, logistics, and inventory sync.
• Comfort with AWS cloud services and cloud-native architecture patterns.
• Experience with scalable APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of databases and caching technologies such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, or MySQL.
• Experience managing outsourced teams or external agencies, holding them to consistent engineering standards and delivery cadence.
• Proficiency in Agile/Scrum environments using Jira and Confluence.
• The communication skills to work across engineering, product, and business without losing anything in translation.

Even better if you have:

• Hands-on integration experience with ERP, OMS, and payment systems.
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices.
• Exposure to analytics, personalisation, or AI-enabled digital product features.
• Experience in high-growth retail or fast-scaling e-commerce environments.

What you can expect:

• Ownership without layers real influence over engineering culture, and end-to-end scope across a full omnichannel stack.
• Speed and greenfield a fast-moving team still actively building, with room to shape how things are done, not just maintain what exists.
• A brand people love pet-friendly culture, regional ambition, and the rare satisfaction of building for an audience that genuinely cares about what you ship.