Technical Team Lead

ELMO UK is building software that helps organisations deliver better experiences for their people. We care about creating products that are useful, well-crafted and reliable, and we know great technology comes from teams that work closely together, challenge thoughtfully and keep learning.

Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But we'll let you in on a secret: there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. ELMO UK is a place where everyone can grow. So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to come into work every day.

Start With People
- We remember our work affects real people, so we take the time to listen, understand and act with care.

Own It, Together
- We take responsibility for our part, support each other through the messy bits, and focus on fixing things rather than finding blame.

Clear Is Kind
- We speak honestly and with care. We don’t avoid difficult conversations, and we make sure people have the clarity they need to move forward.

We’re looking for a Technical Team Lead to lead a single squad while staying deeply connected to the code. This is a hybrid role with roughly 50% hands‑on senior engineering and 50% people and delivery leadership, working on our React / Node stack in close collaboration with our global engineering team in Australia.

This role is central to how we deliver high-quality software ’ll be the voice of engineering for your squad’s product domain, partnering with the Product Owner as an equal owner of what gets built and how. You’ll own the technical direction, contribute to the hardest engineering work, line‑manage the team, and drive the squad’s shift to an AI‑native SDLC that makes delivery faster and safer.

Let’s be clear from the start: this isn’t a role where you sit outside the work and direct from a distance. You’ll lead through the squad, stay hands‑on in the hardest technical problems, and create the conditions for others to deliver well. You are the engineering voice, the technical leader, and the person responsible for helping the squad ship predictably and grow stronger over time.

Owning squad delivery:
Turning the roadmap into predictable, on‑commitment shipped outcomes, while shaping and reducing scope with the Product Owner to protect what is feasible and valuable.

Leading across parallel streams:
Setting direction and priorities across several streams of work, giving Seniors room to lead while providing oversight, unblocking and escalation support.

Being the voice of engineering:
Partnering with the Product Owner as an equal owner of the domain, putting trade‑offs on the table, and making sure what gets built is technically sound and buildable.

Staying hands‑on:
Contributing as a senior engineer around half the time, taking on architecture, the hardest React / Node problems and reference implementations that model the technical bar.

Owning technical direction:
Leading architecture, boundaries, standards, build‑vs‑buy decisions, integration design and the call on when to take on technical debt and when to pay it down.

Protecting release quality and operations:
Owning release readiness, progressive rollout, rollback, NFRs, SLOs, incident leadership and the wider security posture for the domain.

Driving AI‑native delivery:
Planning and leading the squad’s use of AI tools and agents like Claude Code and Codex, setting standards, workflows and tooling so the whole squad gets faster and safer.

Leading the people side:
Running 1:1s, career development, performance management and hard conversations with clarity and…