Lead Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 30, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 20, 2026.
Lead Engineer
London
Permanent
We run the campaigns ourselves, so we know exactly what the software has to do.
Buttermilk is a London creator-marketing agency. Pantry is the platform our team, our creators and our clients use to run campaigns end to end. It is live with our internal team today. The demand is already here: every campaign we run is waiting on this platform.
Why this is different
Search and reporting are table stakes. The hard part is the operational core: shortlists clients actually approve, outreach that lands, creators paid on time, and AI that understands the Creator.
Most creator platforms are built by people who have never run a campaign. Ours is built next to the team that runs them every day.
What you'd own
The platform that takes Pantry from alpha to what the whole agency runs on. If you want to point at a platform in production and say you built it, this is that seat.
You code every day, set the architecture and work as the product partner to Matt, our Product Lead.
Build. Ship vertical slices that real users can try, quickly but built to last. Direct AI coding agents and review their output critically.
Decide. Own the architecture and scaling calls, and keep one source of truth for how the system fits together.
Run it. Own observability and alerting, and step in when production misbehaves.
Partner on product. Break epics into stories, flag dependencies early, challenge the roadmap and demo to the business.
Plan honestly. Say what one engineer can deliver by a given date, and say early when that is not enough.
Grow the team. Decide when we need more engineers, then hire and lead them.
Along the way: the production basics, creator and campaign intelligence with our data science lead, and integrations for CRM, payments, outreach and invoicing, on a path to SOC 2.
The team you'd join
Product Lead
Full Stack Engineer
Data Science Lead
The campaign team: our daily users, at the next desk.
How we work
Decisions are written down and shipped, not held in meetings. We build agent-first and test-driven, in small pull requests, with everything in code, infrastructure included.
What we're looking for
We are hiring at lead level, to build and to stay. There is no senior engineer above you.
You have built and scaled a production product to 10,000+ users, and made its architecture calls
You ship in vertical slices, fast but without building things that fall over a month later
You use AI coding tools every day, can refactor a largely agent-written codebase, and read what the agents produce
You have shipped LLM features to production, not just prototypes: structured output, validation, batch versus live calls, cost per item and evaluation
You have built for external users: authentication, data isolation between clients, payments and GDPR
You build rapport quickly with non-engineers and explain trade-offs plainly
You like being in the office with the people who use what you build
Strong plus: multimodal AI (video, image, audio); Python and FastAPI; Google Cloud, Terraform and CI/CD; ingestion from third-party APIs; email deliverability; SOC 2; creator-economy or agency experience.
Transferable experience counts. If your architecture and scaling experience carries over, the exact stack matters less.
You probably won't enjoy this if
You want detailed specs before you start
You would rather design systems than build and run them
You want a specialist for every layer
You trust AI-written code without reading it
Stack
Python services (FastAPI, SQLModel) and a Next.js/TypeScript app on Google Cloud: Cloud Run, Cloud SQL Postgres, BigQuery and Pub/Sub, all in Terraform and deployed from GitHub Actions. It's early enough that you will shape it.
What We Offer
Pension, matching contributions
Private Medical Insurance
Juno Wellbeing Credits
Hybrid Working (London)
£150 Home Office Setup Budget
Night Key Membership
Birthday Leave
Learning & Development Budget