Full-Stack Engineer; AI-enabled

We're looking for a Senior/Lead Full Stack Engineer with an AI-native mindset to join Etch. Depending on where you are in your career, you'll either be delivering exceptional digital products as a strong senior contributor, or stepping up to lead and shape how we build them.

Either way, you'll be hands‑on, working inside small, cross‑functional teams alongside designers, strategists, and product thinkers — owning a product from problem to production with AI as a first principle from day one.

Full‑time Employed

Hybrid - 2 days per week, Southampton

This is a role that provides opportunity to demonstrate real craft and real impact. You'll work on ambitious digital products for our clients — often embedded alongside their own teams and inside their own codebases — with the space to bring your own thinking rather than just execute against a brief. AI has fundamentally changed what’s possible in digital product development, and we want someone who’s already delivering production‑grade solutions using it, at pace, without trading away quality.

At senior level, you’ll be a strong individual contributor delivering across the stack but also growing your influence within the pod. At lead level, you’ll be in the room when problems are being defined, shaping product technology decisions, setting technical standards, and bringing the team with you. Both matter to us equally and we’ll level the role to match the right person.

Depending on level, your day‑to‑day will include some or all of the following:

• Deliver digital products and experiences across the full stack, through their entire lifecycle — from discovery and definition through to deployment and iteration — in tight, continuous loops rather than long stage‑gated phases
• Work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with design and product on the same product from day one, turning ambiguous requirements into well‑defined, shipped solutions with no handovers or translation loss
• Use AI agents and tooling as a core part of how you build, test, and deploy — pushing for the maximum velocity the codebase and context will allow
• Drive continuous improvement on existing client products, identifying where AI can accelerate delivery and uphold quality, and surfacing the bottlenecks that hold delivery back
• Participate in workshops and sprint ceremonies, assisting with creation of user stories, acceptance criteria, and estimates
• Contribute to (senior level) or own (lead level) AI‑led engineering ways of working, including documenting technical standards, tooling decisions, best‑practice and SOPs
• Mentor and upskill engineers across the team (lead level)
• Identify and lead R&D opportunities (lead level)
• Translate and communicate technical matters clearly for both technical and non‑technical stakeholders
• Act as a technology evangelist, sharing news, emerging tools, and updates on the AI landscape with the wider team
• Continuously measure and identify opportunities to improve methodology and process

• A proven record of full‑stack engineering, with an ability to write secure, performant, and maintainable production‑quality code across frontend and backend
• Experience owning an entire software delivery lifecycle, end to end
• Practical experience developing production products with AI developer tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Codex)
• Confidence working at pace inside existing or legacy codebases under real‑world governance and constraints
• Solid BDD/TDD practices and a component‑driven approach to building (e.g., Storybook or similar)
• Strong understanding of REST/GraphQL API design and consumption
• Experience with Dev Ops practices: CI/CD, containerisation (Docker), IaC
• An ability to spot problems — and bottlenecks — where others can’t
• A desire to continually improve practices and knowledge
• Experience working in an agency or across multiple concurrent partner projects
• Excellent communication in distributed, flexible, and embedded working environments

• Awareness of and contribution to wider solution design/architecture discussions and concerns
• Experience establishing technical standards, engineering patterns, or ways of working within a team
• Experi…