Tech Lead - New Customers Team

Tech Lead - New Customers Team Hybrid in London, UK We’re looking for a Tech Lead You'll lead the engineering behind how new businesses become iwoca customers – the application they fill in, the checks they go through, and the offer they get. The company Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are. That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed. We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive. The team The New Customers team owns everything from a business's first application to a funded loan: the application flow, the logic that routes each application, the documents we ask customers for, and the models that set loan amounts and pricing. Its measure of success is the customer lifetime value it adds between sign-up and first loan. The team sets its own goals and direction. It brings together engineers, data scientists, and product and strategy people. It partners closely with credit risk on the trade-offs behind every lending decision. Knowledge sharing is central to how the team works, supported by regular forums to share findings, and dedicated research and development time. You'll lead two engineers and report to the head of engineering for iwoca's customer journey, from first application to repeat lending. The role As the Tech Lead, you'll spend most of your time building. The team is moving its offer logic out of a legacy monolith into a new service. It's the biggest change in a decade to the system behind iwoca's lending decisions. The next phase is yours to lead. • Autonomy and ownership. You'll shape what the team builds, decide how to build it, and own what goes live. You'll set its engineering roadmap, including what to pull out of the monolith, what to rewrite, and in what order. • Technical complexity. You'll design the team's part of the new service, which turns models and rules into a lending decision and optimises each offer across amount, duration, fee, and interest rate. You'll keep it reliable in production, easy to change as the models evolve, and able to show how it reached each decision. • Experimentation and learning. You'll build the systems that let data scientists test new models on live applications. Some experiments run for years, until each loan reaches the end of its term. You'll see the long-term results of the team's lending decisions. • Influence. You'll get colleagues across iwoca behind technical work that competes with new features for time. • Leadership and growth. You'll line-manage and coach the team's engineers, setting context and helping them own projects end to end. As the team grows, you'll decide the skills and make-up it needs, and hire the engineers to match. The requirements Essential: • Technical leadership . You've led a team of engineers for at least two years, including line management, while still remaining hands on. • Backend engineering. You have deep expertise in at least one object-oriented language. You've designed, built, and run customer-facing backend systems in production. • Commercial or product thinking. You take a business goal, get to the root of what's needed and why, and turn it into a technical plan. You can explai