{"id":3282171,"url":"https://alion.io/job/appnovation-technical-lead","title":"Technical Lead","company":{"id":58181,"name":"Appnovation","domain":"appnovation.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/appnovation","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":27,"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":99000,"max_usd":199000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":54},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"GDPR","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"Lighthouse","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"n8n","optional":false},{"name":"Netlify","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Strapi","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vercel","optional":false},{"name":"Webflow","optional":false},{"name":"Zapier","optional":false},{"name":"Algolia","optional":true},{"name":"Figma","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Storybook","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-26T14:35:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T11:14:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About us\nAppnovation is the AI Product Company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with teams around the world, Appnovation builds AI products, delivers enterprise AI and digital solutions, and co-invests with clients to bring new AI products to market.\nOpen source has been the foundation of Appnovation's work since 2007, and it remains the foundation underneath every AI product the company builds today. Appnovation teams work with organizations in highly regulated industries, including global leaders such as Pfizer, Google and AstraZeneca, to help them adopt AI they can govern and own.\nAbout the role\nWe are hiring a UK-based Technical Lead to work with our existing global team and promote quality and excellence in our web-based solution delivery.\nOur team builds and runs corporate and enterprise-scale web properties on a composable stack: headless CMS, Node and React front ends, and the integrations that connect them to the client's wider platform.\nYou will be the team's technical voice to the client as well as leading the development of your assigned projects. You will work with the team to translate business goals into a clear deliverable technical plan while communicating trade-offs, risk and progress to stakeholders.\nThis is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will plan, code and review, while being accountable for the technical outcome of the project team.\nWhat you will do\nTechnical direction and quality\nSet the team's technical direction and own architecture and design decisions across the composable stack.\nSelect and justify the right headless CMS, front-end framework and hosting approach for each property, weighing editorial experience, performance, cost and lock-in.\nDesign content models and component libraries that scale across multiple brands, sites, regions and locales.\nUphold coding standards and best practices through consistent code review.\nEnsure developers test their own work before it reaches QA, with automated testing and CI/CD in place.\nHold the team to clear standards for security, accessibility, search and performance (detailed below).\nWeb standards: accessibility, search and performance\nOwn accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA as a minimum, with awareness of the European Accessibility Act and UK public-sector regulations where they apply. Build it into components, content models and testing, combining automated tools (axe, Lighthouse) with manual keyboard and screen-reader checks.\nOwn technical SEO: semantic HTML, structured data (schema.org), metadata, canonicals, sitemaps, hreflang for multi-region sites, and redirect strategy during migrations.\nPrepare properties for answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO), so content is structured, attributable and easy for AI search and assistants to find, understand and cite.\nSet performance budgets and hold the team to Core Web Vitals targets (LCP, INP, CLS), using real-user monitoring as well as lab testing.\nBuild these checks into CI so regressions are caught before release, not after.\nAI-assisted engineering\nLead a team working in a heavily AI-tooled environment, using coding assistants and agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or Cursor, and set clear rules for how they are used.\nPreserve codebase quality: AI-generated code meets the same standards for review, testing, security and maintainability as hand-written code.\nKeep people accountable: every change has an owner who understands it, and architecture decisions are not delegated to tools.\nMaintain the guardrails that make AI output reliable, including linting, type checking, test coverage, documented conventions and context files the tools can follow.\nWatch for AI-specific risks, such as client data or secrets in prompts, licence and IP concerns, and duplicated or inconsistent code.\nMigrations and integrations\nPlan and lead content and platform migrations from legacy or monolithic CMS platforms to headless, including content audits, mapping, transformation and URL redirect strategy.\nDesign repeatable migration and automation pipelines using n8n or similar tools, alongside custom Node scripts where needed.\nLead integration development between the CMS and the client's wider estate, such as CRM, DAM, PIM, search, analytics, marketing automation and identity.\nOwn API design, webhooks and event-driven patterns, with clear error handling, monitoring and rollback.\nDocumentation and knowledge sharing\nOwn documentation for architecture, content models, integrations, design decisions and technical specifications.\nTurn one-to-one guidance into reusable material so onboarding and handoff don't depend on any one person.\nStay current on [client-specific compliance requirements, e.g. UK GDPR, cookie consent (PECR) and accessibility obligations].\nTeam leadership and mentoring\nBreak plans down into well-formed tasks and stories the team can act on.\nDelegate work fairly and evenly across the team.\nCoach and mentor developers to grow the team's capability in headless and composable delivery.\nClient communication and stakeholder management\nServe as the client's primary contact for technical discussions.\nExplain technical concepts, options and status to non-technical stakeholders, including marketing and content teams, in plain language.\nManage client expectations honestly on scope, effort and risk.\nDelivery\nLead technical input to planning, estimation and backlog refinement.\nTrack progress against milestones and budget with the project manager.\nIdentify technical risks early, particularly around migration cut-over and third-party integrations, and escalate critical issues before they become surprises.\nCommercial awareness\nSeek client feedback and fold it into development cycles.\nSpot genuine opportunities to add value for the client, and bring them to the account team.\nWhat success looks like\nDelegation is healthy. Work is spread across the team, not bottlenecked on you.\nDocumentation survives handoff. A new engineer can onboard and maintain the system from what is written down.\nMigrations land cleanly. Content moves with no lost pages, broken links or SEO drop, and cut-overs happen on the planned date.\nStandards are measurable. Properties meet WCAG 2.2 AA and Core Web Vitals targets, and are visible in both traditional and AI-driven search.\nQuality holds as speed rises. AI tooling increases throughput without increasing defects, accessibility issues or performance regressions.\nEditors are self-sufficient. Content teams can build and publish pages without developer help.\nIntegrations are reliable. Data flows between systems are monitored, and failures are caught before the client notices.\nThe client trusts you. Stakeholders route technical decisions through you.\nWhat you bring\nRequired\n8+ years in software development, including at least 2 years leading a team's technical direction.\nA track record delivering corporate and enterprise-scale web properties: multi-site, multi-brand or multi-region platforms with high traffic, complex governance and many stakeholders.\nProven ability to turn a technical vision into a clear, actionable plan a team can execute.\nExcellent communication with non-technical audiences.\nRight to work in the UK.\nTechnical skills\n Composable architecture: designing MACH-style (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) solutions and making sound build-versus-buy decisions.\nHeadless CMS: hands-on delivery with at least two of Sanity, Contentful, Builder.io, Strapi or Webflow, including content modelling, editorial workflows, localisation and preview.\nReact: strong production experience, ideally with Next.js or a similar framework, covering SSR, SSG and ISR rendering strategies.\nNode.js and TypeScript: building APIs, serverless functions, middleware and scripts.\n Migrations: leading content or platform migrations at scale, using n8n or similar automation tools (e.g. Make, Zapier, custom ETL) as well as scripted approaches.\n Integration development: REST and GraphQL APIs, webhooks, authentication (OAuth, SSO) and connecting a CMS to CRM, DAM, PIM, search and analytics platforms.\nEngineering practice: Git workflows, CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment to platforms such as Vercel, Netlify, AWS or Azure.\nAccessibility: in-depth knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, ARIA and semantic HTML, with hands-on assistive-technology testing.\nSearch, AEO and GEO: technical SEO, structured data, and structuring content so it performs in AI-driven search and answer engines.\nPerformance: Core Web Vitals, performance budgets, caching and CDN strategy, and image, font and script optimisation.\nAI-assisted development: daily, fluent use of AI coding tools, with the judgement to review, test and reject their output so the codebase stays clean and maintainable.\nNice to have\nConsulting or agency experience, managing client relationships alongside delivery.\nExperience establishing team practices from scratch on a new engagement.\nExperience writing AI usage policies or engineering guidelines for a team.\nCertifications or partner experience with Sanity, Contentful or other composable vendors.\nExperience with commerce or search platforms in a composable stack (e.g. Shopify, commercetools, Algolia).\nFamiliarity with design systems and tools such as Storybook and Figma.\nThank you for your interest in a career with Appnovation Technologies! Please note that only those selected for an interview will be contacted.\nAt Appnovation, we recognize that diverse teams are the strongest teams. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is not only something that we embrace - we celebrate it! We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds, lived experiences and industries to apply. Come join us at Appnovation, and learn more about how we stay true to our company values as we build better lives through better digital. \n\nAccommodations are available upon request throughout the recruitment process.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9935,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Web Design","Web Development Services","Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-26T16:55:49Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":27,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/appnovation-technical-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/appnovation-technical-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-27T12:48:14Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":663,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-28T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":58181},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=58181"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fappnovation-technical-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fappnovation-technical-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fappnovation-technical-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/appnovation-technical-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fappnovation-technical-lead"}]}