Lead Backend Developer

Waracle are looking for a Lead Developer to join our world-class digital technology consultancy and home to a diverse, smart, curious, and ambitious community of specialists in technology-driven transformation. We work with ambitious clients to help them solve their biggest business and customer challenges. We help our clients to innovate and create intelligent digital products and services. We thrive on complex challenges and deliver business-critical IT transformation projects, moving seamlessly from strategy, design, and delivery to operations.

This is a Hybrid role working from our London office 2 days a week.

As a Lead Developer, you will provide technical leadership across squads, defining architecture, guiding engineering best practices, and ensuring high-quality delivery aligned with client and business goals. You will translate business priorities into technical roadmaps, manage delivery expectations around scope, budget, and timelines, and create a psychologically safe, high-performing environment where teams can thrive.

If you are a collaborative leader who thrives on solving complex technical challenges, enjoys mentoring and empowering teams, and is passionate about delivering high-quality solutions that create real business value, we would love to welcome you to our team.

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, your role will cover:

• Strategic Planning & Roadmaps: Translate business objectives into effective technical strategies, ensuring engineering roadmaps align with long-term client goals and deliver sustainable value.

• Stakeholder Management & Collaboration: Facilitate workshops to understand requirements, align technical solutions with business needs, and manage expectations around scope, budget, priorities, and delivery outcomes.

• Team Leadership & Empowerment: Lead squads and projects with accountability for successful delivery, fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe environment where teams can thrive.

• Operational Excellence & Delivery Focus: Own technical delivery outcomes by making informed decisions and pragmatic trade-offs across scope, quality, and timelines to maintain delivery momentum.

• Culture & Knowledge Sharing: Define and evolve Waracle’s technical standards while contributing to our shared body of knowledge through lessons learned, thought leadership, and good practices.

What You'll Bring
Research shows that women and underrepresented groups often apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. At Waracle, we hire for potential, passion, and a collaborative mindset just as much as current experience. If you share our values and believe you can excel in this role, we strongly encourage you to apply—even if you don't tick every single box

• Technical Architecture & Scalability: Proven experience designing, documenting, and scaling complex back-end architectures, distributed systems, microservices, and database designs (SQL and other technologies) within cloud-native environments—particularly Azure (with a focus on API management, maintenance, and scaling).

• Cloud & Engineering Excellence: Strong expertise in cloud-native technologies, building fault-tolerant systems, and implementing effective monitoring, observability, and alerting strategies to ensure operational reliability.

• Commercial & Delivery Awareness: Demonstrable understanding of balancing technical decisions with business priorities, managing scope, budgets, delivery expectations, and evolving client needs.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Proven ability to lead engineering squads, influence technical direction, mentor senior engineers, and promote a culture of collaboration, learning, and engineering excellence.

You can expect an initial call with your dedicated Talent Acquisition Partner, who will chat with you about Waracle, what you are looking for in a new position, the salary for the role, notice period, and benefits. After that, you'll be invited to a two-stage interview process where you will have an opportunity to find out more about the role and showcase your skills and experience. Your Talent Acquisition Partner will guide and support you through the whole process right up to your first day with us