Engineering Team Lead – Tech

• Lead the team responsible for Virtual Personas, Savanta’s synthetic personas solution for market research
• Set direction for Virtual Personas as part of the wider team
• Deliver the product roadmap
• Lead up to four engineers in a cross-functional agile team
• Drive adoption of cloud-first technologies
• Perform full-stack development across Python/FastAPI services and React/Type Script front ends
• Improve team processes for iterative development
• Embed automated testing and CI quality gates into the AI product
• Champion responsible and secure LLM use, including prompt-injection awareness, defensive design and sound data handling
• Set technical direction for the team
• Interact directly with customers, understand their needs and generalise them
• Build fast, scalable and flexible systems within budget
• Mentor, support and encourage developers
• Conduct regular one-to-ones, set objectives and assist with tailored development plans
• Run project kick-offs, stakeholder check-ins and retrospectives
• Use spikes to de-risk work and guide iteration toward long-term scalable architecture

• Experience leading agile rapid release iterations, ideally on fast-moving AI/LLM-powered products
• Extensive experience specifically with Python and modern async web frameworks, or experience in closely related languages
• Hands‑on experience building or maintaining LLM-powered applications, including prompt design, multi‑provider integration and agent orchestration
• Strong RDBMS experience, such as PostgreSQL
• Comfort with document stores, such as MongoDB, and caching layers, such as Redis
• Comfortable working with AI‑assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Git Hub Copilot
• Willingness to learn new technologies, emerging AI tooling, the business and platform, and ways of working
• Full product delivery mindset focused on a tested user experience
• Test‑first approach and ability to establish CI quality gates, including lint, type‑check and test
• Experience running project kick-offs, stakeholder check-ins and retrospectives
• Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities and managed change
• Confidence using spikes to de-risk work and guiding iteration toward scalable architecture
• Ability to harden AI features against prompt injection and unbounded model behaviour
• Desirable:
  FastAPI, async SQL Alchemy and/or Node/Express
• Desirable:
  React/Type Script front‑end development
• Desirable:
  Lang Chain, Lang Graph or other multi‑agent/LLM orchestration frameworks
• Desirable:
  Azure services or AWS equivalents
• Desirable: LLM observability/evaluation tooling and resilience patterns for third‑party AI providers
• Desirable:
  Awareness of GDPR and EU AI Act considerations
• Desirable:
  Informal leadership or formal management experience
• Desirable:
  Experience working across team boundaries with stakeholders
• Unable to offer visa sponsorship

Demonstrates expertise in leading agile teams to deliver AI/LLM-powered products, with a strong focus on full-stack development using Python and modern web frameworks. Capable of mentoring developers, driving cloud-first technology adoption, and ensuring robust product delivery through automated testing and CI quality gates.

• Python Development
• Full-Stack Development
• Agile Leadership
• LLM Application Development
• Automated Testing

• Python
• FastAPI
• React
• Type Script
• PostgreSQL
• MongoDB
• Redis
• Async SQL Alchemy
• CI Quality Gates
• Prompt Design

• Mentoring
• Stakeholder Management
• Adaptability
• Team Collaboration
• Communication

• AI
• LLM
• Agile
• GDPR
• EU AI Act

• Claude Code
• Cursor
• Git Hub Copilot
• Azure Services
• AWS