Lead Platform Engineer

JOIN OUR JOURNEY

Medialab is the UK’s leading independent media agency, and one of the fastest growing in the industry. We’re a media agency that’s made differently: purpose-led, data-driven, founder-run and proudly independent.

Our entrepreneurial spirit means success is recognised and rewarded. There are no limits to what you can achieve here, which our employees agree with, evidenced by being a Campaign Best Place to Work for six consecutive years and one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2025. As well as this, we’re Campaign’s Independent Agency of the Year 2024 and Media Week’s Independent Agency of the Year 2025.

We are IPA Effectiveness accredited, an IPA People-First agency, and All In Champions, with industry-leading work recognised by double-gold at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards for our work with Laithwaites and a 2025 Effie for our work with Alzheimer’s Society.

Our independence means we can focus 100% on doing the right thing to secure success for our clients and our brilliant people. We work with a wide variety of clients including Hovis, IG, Sharps Bedrooms, Sun Life, Standard Life, Ancestry, Laithwaites Wine, Save the Children, Guide Dogs, Alzheimer’s Society, RNLI and Clearscore.

• Commit to Doing the Right Thing (Act with integrity and accountability)

• Help People Flourish (Invest in people)

• Dig Deeper to Understand Better (Data driven curiosity)

Working at Medialab comes with lots of perks including all the usual things you would expect, such as a competitive salary package, pension, season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, weekly social events and big summer / end of year parties.

On top of that, we offer extra benefits, which make life at Medialab even more rewarding:

• Time to Unwind – We offer generous holiday entitlement that increases with long service, plus Christmas closure and a birthday day off. Alongside this, we offer flexible benefits including a holiday buy scheme, flexi-hours, a work abroad scheme, cultural bank holiday swaps, and Friday Summer hours.

• Hybrid Working – Balance between home and office (3 days in office). We welcome requests for flexible working arrangements from the commencement of employment.

• Career Growth – A meritocratic approach to progression with quarterly reviews, CPD Platinum accredited training, mentoring and leadership support.

• Health & Wellbeing – Private medical insurance, health cash plan, gym discounts, wellbeing apps Mental Health First Aiders and unlimited free professional counselling.

• Supporting Families – Enhanced parental leave, flexible working and life assurance.

• Giving Back – Paid charity days and sustainability initiatives.

• Perks & Rewards – Retail discounts, long-service trips and an unforgettable team culture.

As the senior technical lead responsible for the non-data foundations of Apollo – Medialab’s marketing intelligence platform, the Lead Platform Engineer will play a critical role in shaping how we build, ship and operate software across the business.

This is a new, senior and highly influential role within the Engineering team. You will sit alongside our Lead Analytics Engineer as an equal-seniority counterpart, owning the platform, application and developer-experience side of Apollo, while working closely with the Head of Data & Engineering on overall architecture and long-term direction.

We’re looking for a hands-on, Python-first engineer who enjoys operating at both strategic and implementation levels: writing production code, setting standards, making technical decisions, and creating an environment where other engineers can do their best work. This is not a JavaScript-led “full-stack” role but you should be comfortable building user-facing applications and unafraid of frontends.

• Accountable for the technical quality, structure and evolution of all non-data components of the Apollo platform.

• Responsible for leading the design and development of our core applications and internal tools, including multiple production UIs built using Python-centric stacks (e.g. FastAPI, Jinja, HTMX, Tailwind).

• Responsible for making and…