Engineering Lead

Engineering Lead - Search | Manchester or London - Hybrid (1-2 days per week) | Competitive Salary + Benefits

About the Role

Search helps millions of customers navigate and explore our huge catalogue of products, making it easier to find the right way to connect with the people they care about. It’s a core capability for Moonpig, and you’ll help us build and deliver search experiences that support customer engagement and growth.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll spend around 50-75% of your time coding and delivering initiatives, while also helping the team plan, manage dependencies and understand how Search fits into larger projects.

You don’t need years of Engineering Lead experience. We’re looking for a strong senior-level engineer with deep OpenSearch or comparable search-engine experience, who wants to take the next step into engineering leadership. You’ll help guide a team of engineers while remaining close to the code. Line management will continue to sit with the Senior Engineering Manager.

Our expectations of our Engineering Leads

Good engineering comes first - You’ll have a great technical knowledge base and the experience to know what works and what doesn’t. We expect you to apply these skills in making the right decisions and applying best practices wherever possible.

Technical mentoring and leadership - You’ll be collaborative, inclusive and spreading knowledge wherever possible. People will be looking up to you for technical guidance and part of your role will be to help them on that journey. You will also be responsible for creating the right forums to drive engineering principles and practices across all of engineering. You have the autonomy to drive decisions, but it’s your responsibility to ensure everyone is involved.

Community Mindset - Engage with the engineering community within Moonpig, sharing knowledge and contributing to the continuous improvement of our practices.

Culture and Advocacy - You will play a key role in contributing to a supportive, inclusive, and growth-oriented culture. This includes encouraging knowledge sharing, creating opportunities for collaboration and learning, and helping to represent and advocate for our values both within the organisation and in the wider community. This is important to us because we believe in growing and succeeding together.

Key Responsibilities

• Write clean, high-quality code and remain hands-on with the day-to-day technical delivery of Search initiatives.
• Own and develop our backend integration with OpenSearch, alongside the wider team.
• Build and maintain scalable, resilient infrastructure using AWS and Terraform.
• Build and maintain customer-facing features using technologies including .NET/C#, React, Node.js, TypeScript and GraphQL.
• Design, implement and A/B test new features as part of a cross-functional team, using agile principles to scope, track and deliver work.
• Build appropriate tests into new development and contribute to the ongoing quality and safety of the codebase.
• Collaborate with engineers and data teams to design and deliver AI/ML-driven features using internal ML inference APIs and external LLMs.
• Work closely with Product, Design, Data Science and engineering teams to understand priorities, dependencies and how Search contributes to wider initiatives.
• Support client teams integrating with our services by providing technical guidance and practical solutions.
• Help shape the Search team roadmap with Engineering, Product and Design stakeholders, constructively challenging plans where needed.
• Provide delivery estimates, explain the thinking behind them and identify the ongoing engineering work needed to keep our services operating effectively.
• Stay closely involved in technical execution, including estimation, planning and backlog refinement.
• Help the team make pragmatic technical decisions, including when to build something ourselves and when to use existing solutions.
• Create clear communication within and outside the team so dependencies, decisions and delivery plans are understood.
• Advocate for the Search team in wider discussions and help communicate its technical context, priorities and constraints.
• Support a collaborative environment where engineers have ownership of how they work rather than imposing a preferred process.
• Coach and support colleagues, encouraging knowledge sharing and helping build technical capability across the team.
• Identify opportunities to improve delivery processes while working with the Senior Engineering Manager to maintain appropriate standards.
• Engage with Moonpig’s wider engineering community and champion effective engineering practices across teams.
• Provide relevant input and feedback to Engineering Managers on engineers working within your area.

About You:

• Strong hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch or comparable search-engine technology, with OpenSearch experience particularly valuable for this role.
• Strong understanding of how search engines work and how search models rank products.
• Understanding of model building and how engineers can build on and integrate with search models.
• Strong hands-on software engineering experience, including C#/.NET.
• Experience across frontend and backend development.
• Experience with some of our wider technology stack, which includes AWS serverless, React, Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL and Terraform.
• Ability to collaborate on complex technical work, contribute to design discussions and deliver high-quality solutions.
• Experience working cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data Science and other engineering teams.
• Ability to communicate technical topics clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience planning technical delivery, managing dependencies and providing clear, reasoned estimates.
• Comfortable balancing hands-on engineering with wider team and stakeholder responsibilities.
• Collaborative leadership style, with the confidence to challenge constructively, listen to different perspectives and advocate for the team.
• Interest in coaching others, sharing knowledge and helping engineers develop.
• Keen to keep learning new processes, techniques and technologies.
• Motivation to take the next step from senior engineering into a broader engineering leadership role.
• Experience with serverless, event-driven systems would be beneficial.

Our Tech Environment:

• OpenSearch
• AWS serverless
• .NET / C#
• React
• Node.js
• TypeScript
• GraphQL
• Terraform
• GitHub and CI/CD pipelines
• Internal ML inference APIs and external LLMs

Our Interview Process:

• Stage 1: Recruiter Screening Call 15-30mins
• Stage 2: Take home tech test
• Stage 3: Pairing interview 60-90mins
• Stage 4: System design interview 60mins
• Stage 5: Final culture/team fit interview 30mins
• Offer!

Please note: Our interview process may vary depending on the specific role, hiring team availability, or other business needs. We aim to keep candidates informed of any changes throughout the process.