Tech Lead

About Sedex

Sedex is a trusted partner for over 100000 businesses worldwide helping them create socially and environmentally sustainable supply chains. Through our platforms powerful data insights and expert guidance we simplify the management assessment and reporting of sustainability performance.

Our Vision is to be a leader in making global supply chains more socially and environmentally sustainable. Our Mission is To provide data-driven insights accessible tools and exceptional services that support businesses in improving environmental social and governance (ESG) performance and outcomes.

The role

We are looking for an experienced hands-on Tech Lead to lead engineering within the application layer of our SaaS platform.

You will lead a small cross-functional engineering pod responsible for building and evolving the services that power our product experience. The role combines hands-on software development technical leadership and architectural ownership. You will also line-manage the engineers in your pod taking responsibility for their performance growth and wellbeing.

We expect our Tech Leads to be exceptional engineers first people who lead through the quality of their thinking and the systems they build. A key part of this role is driving engineering leverage: modern development tools automation and AI-assisted coding allow small teams to achieve dramatically higher productivity. You will help embed these practices into everyday engineering work while maintaining high standards of reliability and maintainability.

In the First Four Weeks

Familiarise with the systems with which your team works

Understand the overall architectural landscape in which your systems live

Begin driving solutions within your domain and making positive contributions to the solutions of others via architectural reviews

Gain an in-depth understanding of the production environment setup CI/CD pipeline and deployment approach

Familiarise with and begin monitoring the operational data and metrics from the production environment

Become productive and begin delivering at your true pace

Build relationships cross-team and cross-function

Understand the team processes and cycles and start forming ideas on how they can be improved

Develop a solid grounding in your understanding of the business and how it operates

Ongoing Responsibilities

Build and Evolve Platform Services

You will design and build the services that deliver core product capabilities. This includes:

Designing maintainable service architectures

Implementing high-quality production code

Ensuring services are scalable observable and reliable

Evolving systems as product requirements grow

Provide Technical Leadership

You will guide the technical direction of the services owned by your pod. This includes:

Shaping architecture and technical design

Making pragmatic trade-offs between speed and sustainability

Ensuring strong engineering practices across the team

Contributing to cross-team architectural discussions

You will lead primarily through technical credibility and example.

Line Management

You will line-manage the engineers in your pod. This is a core part of the role not an afterthought. Your responsibilities include:

Running regular 1:1s and providing ongoing feedback

Supporting each engineers professional development and career growth

Setting clear expectations and holding people to account

Creating a psychologically safe environment where people feel free to highlight risk challenge ideas and acknowledge mistakes

Contributing to hiring decisions for your team

Fostering a culture of personal development and individual accountability challenging engineers to constantly push their boundaries

Improve Engineering Productivity

A central part of the role is improving how the team builds software. You will:

Remove technical bottlenecks and sources of friction

Simplify architecture where possible

Improve development workflows and CI/CD processes

Introduce automation where it improves delivery speed or reliability

Your goal is to increase the teams delivery capacity without sacrificing quality.

AI-Assisted Development

AI tools are reshaping how software is built. We expect our Tech Leads to be at the forefront of this shift not just using AI tools themselves but actively raising the capability of the whole team.

Your own practice: You will use AI coding assistants as a core part of your daily development workflow for writing and refactoring code generating tests exploring implementation approaches and accelerating routine tasks.

Coaching the team: You will help engineers in your pod develop effective AI-assisted workflows. This means guiding them on how to get the best results from these tools how to critically review AI-generated output and recognising when AI assistance is not the right approach.

Evaluating and introducing tooling: You will stay current with the evolving landscape of AI development tools and make informed recommendations on what the team should adopt. This includes evaluating new tools running trials and making pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions.

Establishing team norms: You will define and maintain clear standards for how AI-generated code is reviewed tested and integrated. AI-assisted code must meet the same quality bar as any other code your role is to ensure this happens consistently.

Measuring impact: You will track and demonstrate the productivity gains from AI-assisted development using this data to refine practices and make the case for further investment.

Communication

Collaborate closely with other functions (Product UX etc.) early in the solutioning process ensuring technical considerations are appropriately represented in decisions

Communicate clearly both into the team and externally on how the team contributes to the goals and priorities of the organisation

Proactively take steps to highlight risk

Act as an ambassador for the Tech department interacting with stakeholders across all levels of the organisation

Delivery

Champion agile best practices and continuous delivery working closely with the Product function to guide the break-down of deliverables into thin vertical slices that support the early delivery of value

Challenge the team to justify approaches based on cost-benefit and business value

Proactively identify cross-team dependencies that may delay delivery and work cross-team to ensure positive outcomes

Ensure that technical expectations of deliveries are met and that non-functional requirements are accounted for with high quality solutions

Advocate for the use of metrics ensuring features are measurable and giving visibility and interpretation to those measures to facilitate informed decision-making

Take ownership of the testing approach adopted by the team and the quality of solutions promoted to production

Foster a security-first approach led by example

Lead by example through the quality and timeliness of the code you produce

What Were Looking For

Were looking for engineers who combine technical depth productivity and pragmatic decision-making. You should have:

35 years experience working in tech teams at a senior level

Strong production experience building systems in Kotlin or Java

Experience designing and evolving distributed services

Experience operating systems in cloud-native environments

Familiarity with DevOps tooling such as Docker Kubernetes Terraform and CI/CD pipelines

A year or more of experience working with AI coding assistants with an ability to articulate the benefits and limitations

Experience mentoring coaching or line-managing other engineers

Excellent communication skills

Strong experience working with Agile methodologies

A results-oriented mindset and a keen sense of accountability

What Exceptional Candidates Often Look Like

Strong candidates for this role often:

Deliver high-quality software quickly and consistently

Simplify systems rather than introducing unnecessary complexity

Automate repetitive engineering work

Think carefully about system behaviour in production

Help raise the technical bar for the engineers around them

Are motivated not only by writing great code but by improving how teams build software over time

Our culture

At Sedex our approach to business and culture is firmly rooted in our core values which guide everything we do:

Respect Each Other: We believe that a foundation of mutual respect is essential to creating a positive and inclusive environment.

Customer-Driven: We are passionate about delivering exceptional value to our customers. By listening to their needs understanding their challenges and continuously adapting our solutions we aim to empower them to achieve their sustainability goals and drive positive change in their supply chains.

Thinking Creatively: Innovation is at the heart of our work. We encourage creative problem-solving and embrace new ideas that challenge the status quo. This mindset allows us to continuously improve our products and services offering fresh and effective solutions to complex sustainability and ethical sourcing issues.

Take Ownership: We empower our team members to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes. Every person at Sedex is encouraged to own their work make decisions with confidence and contribute proactively to the success of the team and the business.

Deliver Results: We are results-oriented and committed to delivering tangible impactful outcomes for our customers our business and society at large.

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