Software Engineering Team Lead Core Platform

Software Engineering Team Lead: Core Platform

Hybrid: Remote/Duel Bristol Office

Salary range: 85000 basic options

Reporting to: VP of Technology Joe Mathews

About Us

Duel is a SaaS company on a mission to make Brand Advocacy the industry standard playbook for building brilliant retail brands. It was founded by world record breaking adventurer and former brand ambassador Paul Archer alongside viral games developer Naio Tsarouchis and we exist to show theres a better way to build businesses to build a better future proving that caring for people builds brand which builds long term and exponential profit returns.

The Duel Brand Advocacy Platform allows enterprise brands to do just that scaling how they manage their relationships with thousands of advocates customers creators and brand ambassadors. Were proud today that brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch Charlotte Tilbury Spanx Victorias Secret and Elemis (to name a few but not to name some household names that we cant talk about yet) are doing just that. The Duel team comprises psychologists brand experts and community builders combining cutting edge brand expertise with seasoned SaaS experience.

The Role

Were hiring a Team Lead Engineer to join our growing engineering team and support the scaling of the Duel SaaS platform.

As it stands our Core Platform team reports directly to Joe VP of Technology ensuring close alignment with companywide engineering goals as we grow rapidly. But as we scale were creating a new leadership role to unlock even greater impact. Youll empower Joe to focus on longterm strategy while you take the reins on engineering leadership for a highperforming team.

The Core Platform team is the engine behind our engineering strategy. We build reusable services establish design patterns and architect scalable infrastructure enabling our product squads to move fast without compromising security or quality. As our products evolve and customer needs become more complex strong technical leadership is essential to keep our systems fast secure and resilient.

This role is a critical step in our growth. Youll bring clarity direction and momentum to the team owning the delivery of foundational platform work and ensuring our technical stack remains robust and modular. If youre excited by the idea of driving high performance and shaping the systems that power product velocity at scale wed love to meet you.

Our technology stack primarily includes Angular (latest version) TypeScript MongoDB Tailwind CSS and Elastic Beanstalk (AWS) with an increasing focus on realtime data processing and scalable services. If you enjoy working across frontend backend infrastructure and everything in between this role is for you.

Were Looking for Someone Who Will

• Lead and empower the Core Platform team with both strategic vision and handson delivery will be a 50/50 role between leadership and hands on coding

• Adopt an AIfirst mindsetconsistently leveraging artificial intelligence across all phases of the workflow to enhance efficiency innovation and strategic outcomes.
  

• Set technical direction and ensure strong architectural decisions across all platform initiatives.
  

• Balance longterm technical health with shortterm delivery needs guiding the team through smart tradeoffs.
  

• Bring clarity to roadmaps and delivery timelines ensuring work is scoped prioritised and executed effectively.
  

• Run effective planning rituals including regular sprint planning standups and retrospectives.
  

• Build and evolve the platform foundationsfrom shared services to security observability and toolingthat enable product teams to move fast and stay safe.
  

• Drive platform improvements to support scale availability and performance as our business grows.
  

• Level up developer experience by improving CI/CD pipelines streamlining internal tooling and reducing friction.
  

• Champion internal standards across libraries interfaces and development patterns to promote consistency and velocity.
  

• Manage and grow a small highperforming team of 23 midtosenior engineers.
  

• Provide regular coaching feedback and career development support through structured checkins and growth conversations.
  

• Foster a collaborative inclusive team culture encouraging shared ownership of the platform.
  

• Build team pride and identity connecting their impact to the wider engineering mission.
  

• Collaborate crossfunctionally with product engineering security and customerfacing teams to align platform investments with business needs.
  

• Engage with technical leadership to ensure our infrastructure roadmap supports the broader company strategy.
  

• Translate future product and customer requirements into scalable secure and reliable platform capabilities.
  

• Act as a trusted partner to the VP of Technology and other senior leaders in shaping longterm platform vision.

Wed love to hear from you if

• You have 5 years of experience in backend or platform engineering.
  

• Youve spent 12 years leading a team with direct reports and ownership of complex crossteam projects.
  

• Youve built or worked on internal platforms and developer experience tooling.
  

• Youve operated in smalltomid sized SaaS companiesbonus points for B2B or APIdriven businesses.
  

• Youre familiar with modern engineering practices like trunkbased development infrastructureascode service ownership and feature flags

• You have solid backend engineering experience ideally with TypeScript in production environments.
  

• Youre comfortable working with datastores like MongoDB (Atlas) ElasticSearch and Snowflake.
  

• You understand distributed systems observability best practices and modern CI/CD workflows.
  

• Youve built internal platforms or reusable services that support multiple teams or squads.
  

• You have a strong architectural sense knowing when to scale when to optimise and when to keep things simple.
  

• Youre familiar with cloud infrastructure (especially AWS) and containerisation tools like Docker ECS or Terraform.
  

• Youve worked in hybrid monolith/microservice environments or serviceoriented architectures.
  

• Youve led technical initiatives across engineers or teams and know how to drive crosscutting projects.
  

• You bring a coachingfirst leadership style setting a high bar while supporting growth.
  

• You take proactive ownership of delivery confidently setting timelines and communicating tradeoffs.
  

• Youre skilled at turning vague business goals into clear actionable platform priorities.
  

• You keep a keen eye on detail without losing track of the big picture.
  

• You have a bias for action and believe in iterating quickly and learning fast.
  

• You value clarity transparency and sharing context to drive aligned .
  

• Youre at ease in ambiguous environments and naturally bring structure where its needed.
  

• You care deeply about building an inclusive curious and driven engineering culture.
  

• You bring calm confident leadership especially when things get complex or highpressure..

Inperson and remote working balance ...

• We have small HQs in Bristol & London (Holborn) with a growing team of people on the ground in our NYC office also.

• Although our approach to hybrid working is flexible priority for this role will be given to candidates who are available to travel to the Bristol office and keen to spend some days each month in a shared space partnering with the VP of Technology and wider engineering team on shared projects.

Why Duel

We want to build a remarkable company with remarkable people and a remarkable culture that you will want to shout from the rooftops about. In a relaxed flexible and fun environment the team is driven to making the business a success while enjoying what we do and who we do it with.

We have a growing benefits package including;

• Flexible working hours if you need to fit around childcare or need to work around your life we understand.

• Around 32 days of Annual Leave 28 excluding bank holidays and an extended break between Christmas and New Year when we close the office). Ongoing training where required.

• Options scheme for all fulltime employees its important to us that everybody owns a part of the company and shares in the benefits of what we build.

• Company MacBook to work from

• 350 WFH SetUp

• Headspace Contributions

• Personal Development budget and support

• 2 additional days leave for volunteering