Technical Lead, Software Development, Software Architect

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

Level: Senior Manager

Salary: Up to £90,000 (+ £1,800 wellbeing allowance + up to 10% bonus)

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.

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.

• 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.

• Extensive software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership in product engineering squads (senior engineer/tech lead responsibilities)
• Hands-on technical delivery: proven ability to…