Engineering Lead - PHP

Engineering Lead - PHP

Waterloo - Hybrid Working
Full Time
Permanent
Grade 5

At Currys we’re united by one passion: to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. As the UK’s best-known retailer of tech, we’re proud of the service our customers receive – and it’s all down to our team of 25,000 caring and committed colleagues. Working as one team, we learn and grow together, celebrating the big and small moments that make every day amazing.

We are looking for a technically experienced Engineering Lead to join our Engineering function and take ownership of engineering quality, standards and delivery across our web application landscape – the technology that powers Currys Online and Mobile. The current estate is primarily PHP, and this role requires credible technical depth in that environment.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. The Engineering Lead will be equally comfortable presenting technical risk to senior stakeholders and conducting code reviews with delivery teams. The split is intentional – we need someone who leads by doing, not just directing.

Our PHP estate is business‑critical, high‑volume and customer‑facing. The immediate priority is stability, quality and incremental enhancement – but this role is also about raising the engineering bar and building the internal capability to carry the platform forward. You will govern external delivery partners, set and enforce standards, and begin growing a small in‑house engineering team.

Role overview:

• Own and enforce engineering standards across all delivery partners and internal teams – covering code quality, patterns, security, and maintainability.
• Conduct and lead code reviews across the PHP estate.
• Define and document engineering principles for the Online & Mobile portfolio, ensuring they are understood and applied consistently across all teams and partners.
• Take technical ownership of the PHP application landscape.
• Identify and address technical debt in a structured, prioritised way.
• Ensure that resilience, self‑healing and scalability are designed into all changes from the start.
• Own the engineering approach to CI/CD – whether stabilising and improving an existing set‑up or introducing new pipeline standards.
• Define and implement pipeline standards, branching strategy, and environment management across the function.
• Conduct technical audits across delivery partners.
• Work closely with external delivery partners to set clear engineering expectations, assure their output, and manage performance against agreed standards – supplier management is a key part of this role.
• Recruit, nurture and develop a small internal Engineering team – building in‑house capability that reduces partner dependency over time.
• Challenge where quality or approach falls short; escalates clearly and quickly when issues put delivery at risk.
• Represent engineering at programme and senior stakeholder level – translating technical complexity into clear, actionable language.
• Apply pragmatic, MVP thinking to delivery.
• Work closely with Solution Architecture, ADMs, Technical Business Analysis and Quality to ensure engineering is set up to deliver.

Required

Skills & Experience:

• 5+ years of senior engineering experience, including time operating at Engineering Lead level in a multi‑team or multi‑partner environment.
• Proven experience governing and assuring large‑scale, full‑stack web applications – the current estate is primarily PHP.
• Experience stabilising, enhancing and maintaining large‑scale, customer‑facing web applications.
• Demonstrable experience building resilient, scalable, production‑grade applications.
• Monitoring and alerting built in from the start, not added later – candidates must be able to articulate their approach to observability as part of design, not an afterthought.
• Strong SDLC knowledge: CI/CD implementation and improvement, pipeline ownership, branching strategy, environment management and release governance.
• Demonstrable ability to work with and hold external delivery partners to account – setting standards, assuring output, managing performance.

Strongly preferred:

• Experience in retail, e‑commerce or a high‑volume consumer‑facing environment.
• Direct PHP experience at senior or lead level – candidates coming from equivalent backend environments must demonstrate a clear ability to govern and assure PHP delivery in practice.
• .NET experience is a strong advantage – the broader Currys engineering landscape includes .NET services and cross‑stack familiarity will be valuable in this role.

We want to make sure you have a fair opportunity to show us your talents during our application process.