Technical Lead (Portal & Applications)

About Lightfoot

Lightfoot builds connected-vehicle technology: in-cab driver coaching, vehicle safety products and fleet telematics. Our software supports real hardware in real vehicles, with customers including Tesco, Asda, Ocado, Virgin Media and Iceland.

We're big enough to have established products and engineering teams, but small enough that strong technical decisions can still change the company's direction.

We're rebuilding the software Lightfoot runs on (the customer portal, the APIs behind it and the mobile app) in Python, React and React Native on AWS. We're also changing how we build: stronger architecture, better automated testing, secure-by-default delivery and agentic development used properly on production systems. We need the technical leader who will shape that transition and lead the team building it.

Type: Permanent, full-time, Monday to Friday.

Location: Remote. You'd attend our Exeter, Devon office roughly every two or three weeks, usually with an overnight, for things genuinely better done together: architecture sessions, kicking off important work, retrospectives and time with the team. Not for the sake of being seen.

About the role

This is first and foremost a technical leadership role. You'll lead the Applications engineering function, but we're not looking for a manager who has stepped away from engineering. We want someone who can set technical direction, make architectural decisions, raise the engineering bar and stay close enough to the detail to know whether those decisions are working.

You'll be responsible for

• Leading the architecture of our next-generation platform across backend, web and mobile.

• Shaping the migration from our existing PHP/MySQL estate, without pretending we can replace everything at once.

• Defining engineering standards and patterns for the new platform.

• Owning the testing strategy: what we test, where we automate and how quality is built into delivery.

• Leading our move to agentic software development, turning a proven individual approach into a repeatable team capability.

• Building security and observability in from the start.

• Developing the team's technical capability through design reviews, mentoring and hands-on leadership.

You'll also line-manage the team and remain accountable for delivery, but the reason we're hiring you is your technical judgement.

What's already decided, and what's yours

The broad direction is agreed: Python/FastAPI for new backend services, React/TypeScript for web, React Native for mobile, AWS (managed and serverless where sensible) and agentic development as a normal part of engineering. You won't spend six months choosing a stack.

The interesting decisions sit underneath: service boundaries, API design, migration sequencing, testing strategy, engineering standards, secure-development practices, observability and how agentic development works across a team.

One constraint: our database is shared across several engineering teams and is mission-critical beyond Applications. Significant schema change is negotiated, not decided unilaterally. We'd rather tell you now.

Staying hands-on

Success here isn't measured by sprint tickets closed. You'll stay technically credible: reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, prototyping important patterns, getting into difficult implementations and helping the team solve hard problems. You'll lead primarily through strong technical judgement, not distance from the code.

What we're looking for

You don't need to be the strongest engineer in every technology above, but you do need to be a strong technical leader. You will have:

• Led engineers technically, not just managed them.

• Designed and evolved substantial production systems.

• Made architectural decisions and explained the trade-offs.

• Strong backend depth, ideally in Python.

• Production experience with AWS and Docker.

• Modernised or re-platformed a live system people depended on.

• Understanding of automated testing deep enough to define a strategy, not simply mandate more tests.

• A view of security as an engineering responsibility.

• The ability to get into an unfamiliar, long-lived codebase and work out what it really does.

• Clear communication of trade-offs to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

• Calm when systems, customers or priorities get noisy.

Navigating PHP and older JavaScript is useful, as that's the estate we're migrating from. You don't need to love it. For the right person, technical strength matters more than arriving as the finished engineering manager.

Why this is a good job

• Shape the next platform, not just maintain the current one. The direction is agreed and the transformation is underway, but the architecture isn't finished.

• Agentic engineering is real here. We already use it successfully on production work. You'll help turn it from something one strong engineer does into a capability the whole team uses well.

• Tangible work. Our software connects to devices fitted to real vehicles. You'll see your team's systems in the windscreen of vehicles delivering groceries, installing broadband and operating some of the UK's largest fleets, and you can explain it at a barbecue.