Technical Lead (Portal & Applications)

About Lightfoot
Lightfoot builds connected-vehicle technology - in-cab driver coaching, vehicle safety products and fleet telematics. Our software supports real hardware in real vehicles, with customers including Tesco, Asda, Ocado, Virgin Media and Iceland.
We’re big enough to have established products and engineering teams, but small enough that strong technical decisions can still change the direction of the company.
We’re rebuilding the software Lightfoot runs on - the customer portal, the APIs behind it and the mobile app - in Python, React and React Native on AWS. We’re also changing how we build software: stronger architecture, better automated testing, secure-by-default delivery and agentic development used properly on production systems. We’re looking for the technical leader who will shape that transition and lead the team building it.

Type: Permanent, full-time, Monday to Friday.

Location: Remote. We’d want you to attend our Office in Exeter, Devon roughly every two or three weeks, usually with an overnight, for the things that are genuinely better done together - architecture sessions, kicking off important work, retrospectives and time with the team. Not for the sake of being seen.

About the role
This is first and foremost a technical leadership role. You’ll lead the Applications engineering function, but we’re not looking for a manager who has stepped away from engineering. We want someone who can set technical direction, make architectural decisions, raise the engineering bar across the team and stay close enough to the detail to know whether those decisions are working.

You’ll be responsible for

• Leading the architecture of our next-generation platform across backend, web and mobile.
• Shaping the migration from our existing PHP/MySQL estate without pretending we can replace everything at once.
• Defining engineering standards and patterns for the new platform.
• Owning the testing strategy — what we test, where we automate and how quality is built into delivery.
• Leading our move to agentic software development, turning a proven individual approach into a repeatable team capability.
• Building security and observability into the platform from the start.
• Developing the technical capability of the team through design reviews, mentoring and hands-on leadership.
• You’ll also line-manage the team and remain accountable for delivery. Those things matter, but the reason we’re hiring you is your technical judgement.

What’s already decided, and what’s yours
The broad technology direction is agreed:

• Python / FastAPI for new backend services.
• React / TypeScript for web.
• React Native for mobile.
• AWS as the platform.
• Managed and serverless services where they make sense.
• Agentic development as a normal part of engineering.

You won’t be asked to spend six months choosing a stack.

The interesting decisions are the ones underneath it: service boundaries, API design, migration sequencing, testing strategy, engineering standards, secure-development practices, observability and how agentic development works across a team.

One important constraint: our database is shared across several engineering teams and is mission-critical beyond Applications. Significant schema change is negotiated, not decided unilaterally. That’s a real architectural constraint, and we’d rather tell you about it now.

Staying hands-on
This isn’t a role where success is measured by how many sprint tickets you close.

It is a role where you’ll be expected to stay technically credible: reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, prototyping important patterns, getting into difficult implementations and helping the team solve hard problems.

You’ll lead engineers primarily through strong technical judgement, not through distance from the code.

What we’re looking for
You do not need to be the strongest engineer in every technology above.
You do need to be a strong technical leader.

We’re looking for someone who

• Has led engineers technically, not just managed them.
• Has designed and evolved substantial production systems.
• Can make architectural decisions and explain the trade-offs behind them.
• Has strong backend engineering depth, ideally in Python.
• Has worked with AWS and Docker in production.
• Has modernised or re-platformed a live system that people depended on.
• Understands automated testing deeply enough to define a strategy, not simply mandate more tests.
• Treats security as an engineering responsibility.
• Can get into an unfamiliar or long-lived codebase and work out what it really does.
• Can communicate technical trade-offs clearly to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Stays calm when systems, customers or priorities get noisy.

• Being able to navigate PHP and older JavaScript is useful because that’s the estate we’re migrating from. You don’t need to love it.
• For the right person, technical strength matters more to us than arriving as the finished engineering manager.

Why this is a good job

• You get to shape the next platform, not just maintain the current one. The technology direction is agreed, and the transformation is already underway.
• The architecture isn’t finished. There are real decisions to make about how the next generation of Lightfoot should be built.
• Agentic engineering is real here. We’re already using it successfully on production engineering work. You’ll help turn that from something one strong engineer can do into a capability the whole team can use well.
• The work is tangible. Our software connects to devices fitted to real vehicles. You’ll see vehicles using systems your team built - delivering groceries, installing broadband and operating some of the UK’s largest fleets.
• Technology you can explain at a barbecue: vehicles, drivers, safety, and data at scale. You will literally see your technology in the windscreen of vehicles driving around town, delivering your groceries or installing your broadband.

REF-230597