Lead Full Stack Engineer (Python / AWS)

Lead Full Stack Engineer (Python / AWS) - 12-Month Contract
London (Hybrid) Inside IR35

We're looking for an experienced Lead Full Stack Engineer (Python / AWS) to take technical ownership of a high-profile digital product for a major organisation. You'll be the senior-most engineer on the product team, shaping the architecture, setting engineering standards and staying hands-on where it matters most. You'll also guide the product towards a more scalable, secure and maintainable technical foundation.
This is a 12-month contract based in London on a hybrid basis, and it sits inside IR35.

The role
You'll provide end-to-end technical leadership across backend, frontend, cloud, CI/CD, observability and data integration. You'll turn business and product requirements into robust technical designs, support engineers through complex problems, and challenge weak design decisions. Delivery needs to stay both technically credible and aligned with product goals.

What you'll do

• Own the technical integrity of the product across its full engineering lifecycle.
• Make and guide architectural decisions across services, APIs, integrations and system boundaries.
• Drive strong standards in code quality, testing, documentation, security and operational readiness.
• Lead root-cause analysis for significant incidents and recurring issues across services.
• Partner with DevOps and platform engineers on CI/CD, deployment strategy and infrastructure patterns.
• Keep technical debt visible and actively managed as part of product prioritisation.
• Contribute to planning, estimation and sequencing so delivery stays realistic and executable.
• Coach engineers by giving them context and direction, without micromanaging.

What we're looking for

• Proven experience leading technical design and delivery of complex production systems.
• Strong hands-on backend experience in Python and FastAPI, including async patterns and service design.
• Strong frontend experience with React and TypeScript.
• Strong AWS knowledge, including Lambda, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, IAM and CloudWatch.
• Solid experience with event-driven architecture, integration design and defining service boundaries.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, Docker, infrastructure-as-code and deployment automation.
• Good understanding of observability (logs, metrics, tracing, alerting) and secure system design (authentication, authorisation, secrets management, least privilege).
• Experience supporting live systems and improving resilience over time in Agile environments.
• The ability to explain trade-offs clearly to engineers and non-engineers, and to influence direction without relying on formal authority.

About you
You communicate clearly and directly and bring structure to ambiguity. You stay calm and credible under pressure. You balance architectural quality with delivery reality, raise standards while staying pragmatic, and build alignment through reasoning rather than hierarchy.

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Vertage Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.