Lead Engineer

OVERVIEW:

This is a hands-on Lead Software Engineer role where you'll be writing code, designing integrations and solving hard technical problems day-to-day, driving the technical direction and improving how we do engineering across Platform Engineering. You'll be a recognised domain authority: shaping architectural vision, setting the technical bar, and actively elevating the engineers and leads around you. You will bring both strong backend engineering craft and the presence to make the whole team better through technical credibility, clear thinking, and a genuine investment in how the team grows and delivers

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING:

Craft

Designs and documents clear architectural diagrams and key decision records that are accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences

Ensures the team is using suitable engineering practices, spotting knowledge gaps and helping adopt new and emerging best practices and tooling where appropriate

Enforces quality and testing best practices from design through to production

Articulates the value of addressing tech debt in terms that resonate with business stakeholders, and creates space to address it iteratively

Brings strong technical grounding with enough parity with the team to earn trust quickly, without the instinct to redesign systems from the ground up

Delivery

Leads the delivery of scalable backend services leveraging Event Driven Architecture and AWS Serverless technologies: Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, DynamoDB

Leads the team to design and build APIs (REST & GraphQL) that support world-class customer-facing features

Has the toolkit to work on complex and unknown problems under pressure or at speed, including leading on business-critical incidents

Delegates low-risk technical decisions that can be revisited if needed, and personally owns high-risk technical decisions that are harder to change

Champions testable, maintainable, observable and scalable software, embedding CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code as first-class considerations across all delivery work

Collaborates with the Product Owner, Scrum Master and Engineering Manager to continuously optimise both the efficiency and impact of team output

Culture

Creates an environment where engineers are empowered to own and deliver their work, breaking down knowledge and delivery silos and stepping back to let the team get things done

Works with Engineering Managers to help engineers at all levels perform and grow through mentoring, learning opportunities and a coaching-first approach to development

Fosters a culture of skill-sharing and accountability through excellent documentation, retrospectives and regular knowledge-sharing

Delivers consistent, constructive feedback and actively seeks it from peers in equal measure

Leadership

Although this is an individual contributor role you will set and communicate a clear technical vision and architectural direction for the team, making pragmatic trade-offs to deliver iteratively against business objectives

Is seen by others as an authority in their technical domain, using that expertise to coach and mentor on more ambiguous and challenging technical problems

Influences technical strategy and cross-team ways of working through trust, sound judgement and clear communication by standardising code and practices across teams without relying on authority

Actively builds peer relationships with other lead engineers by sharing knowledge openly, engaging honestly on technical challenges, and working collectively to raise the bar across the platform engineering teams

Proposes and gets buy-in for projects that would help Gymshark achieve its goals, leading on longer-term technical improvements across quarters

WHAT YOU'LL NEED:

Essential Criteria:

Worked as part of a high-performing software engineering team in a lead or senior contributor capacity

Strong experience writing production code in Golang or another strict typed language in a commercial engineering environment

Strong backend engineering background with hands-on experience implementing event-driven architectures

Experience designing, building and maintaining APIs, with a strong grasp of REST and GraphQL patterns

Strong understanding of high-quality code and architecture best practices, producing readable, maintainable and scalable software

Experience embedding quality and testing practices e.g. unit, contract and integration testing across the teams and services they've worked on

Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code in a production environment

Database design experience across both relational and non-relational approaches

Demonstrable track record of coaching and developing engineers

Contributed to a team's delivery in an agile environment with a clear focus on shipping business value

Experience influencing technical direction without direct authority

Empowers and enables engineers to do their best work, rather than owning it for them

Role models leadership behaviours in communication, feedback, and how ambiguity is handled

Brings a pragmatic, get-things-done attitude alongside technical rigour

Gives and receives candid, constructive feedback openly and regularly

Reflects and upholds Gymshark values: One Team, Hard Work, Stay Humble, Community Service, in day-to-day actions and interactions, and actively role models them for the people around them

CLOSING DATE:

Friday 5th June 2026