The posting
About TEAM LEWIS
TEAM LEWIS is a global marketing agency that has moved from start-up to multi-national in a little over two decades. Its success is due to a combination of factors: its ability to read the future and prepare for it; leveraging cutting-edge AI; strategic thinkers delivering award winning campaigns; expanding client relationships into new markets or services; and above all, independence from outside investors. The practice, its people and its campaigns have won many awards, including Cannes Lions, PRovoke Media, ICCO, European Excellence, PRCA Digital, Digital Impact, Global Digital Excellence.
At the heart of our community is the TEAM LEWIS Foundation (TLF), a non-profit charitable entity. Since its launch in 2021, it has funded over 2,600 causes. It is one of the largest employee-directed philanthropies in the world. The TLF promotes a wide variety of social, cultural, and environmental causes that benefit society. It aims to strengthen the bonds between the creative industries, businesses, government, and non-profits. Community charities are championed by employees who, in addition to the financial donation, volunteer their time and skills to maximise grant effectiveness. You can read more here about TEAM LEWIS Foundation.
Purpose of the role
TEAM LEWIS is hiring a Lead Developer / Technical Lead (Full Stack / AI-enabled products) to lead engineering as we scale our product development capability. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role: you will set the technical direction, build strong delivery and engineering governance, and lead a lean, high-impact engineering team—while still staying close to architecture and critical implementation decisions.
We are expanding our development capability and building a product development team in APAC. We need an experienced leader who can deliver predictably, raise the bar on quality and security, and create reusable standards and “blueprints” that make teams faster over time.
You’ll work across digital experiences—websites, applications, campaign builds—and product work such as SideKick, including LLM/RAG-enabled features. You will establish secure foundations and improve secure delivery practices, ensuring our systems are robust, secure by design, and operationally reliable.
Responsibilities
Engineering leadership
- Build an engineering culture of accountability, documentation, continuous improvement, and pragmatic decision-making.
- Act as the senior escalation point for complex technical and delivery challenges.
- Lead delivery across a distributed setup (APAC + other markets), creating clarity on ownership, standards, and ways of working.
Technical direction, architecture & governance
- Own technical direction across front-end, back-end, integrations, and deployment/operational architecture, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with business goals.
- Define and evolve engineering standards: architecture patterns, code quality expectations, review practices, testing strategy, documentation, and release discipline.
- Establish and maintain reusable “blueprints” (templates, component libraries, shared services, reference architectures) to accelerate delivery across projects.
- Partner with stakeholders to translate requirements into technical plans, manage trade-offs (scope/time/cost/risk), and ensure delivery remains predictable.
Security foundations & secure delivery (core to the role)
- Establish and improve secure engineering foundations across products and builds (authentication/authorization patterns, secure configuration, secrets handling, environment separation).
- Implement pragmatic secure SDLC practices appropriate to our scale (dependency management, code review expectations, and lightweight security checks in CI/CD where possible).
- Partner with internal IT/security and external vendors (where applicable) on security posture, incident response readiness, and remediation.
- Drive incident response workflows, postmortems, and preventative actions focused on reducing repeat issues and improving resilience.
End-to-end delivery & operational excellence
- Lead and improve delivery practices: planning, estimation, prioritisation support, release management, and production support standards.
- Ensure systems are production-ready with appropriate observability, error handling, performance optimisation, and runbooks.
- Drive reliability improvements (uptime, latency, error budgets where applicable), and reduce operational toil through automation.
Full-stack delivery oversight (hands-on where it matters)
- Stay close to implementation and unblock the team through architectural guidance, targeted coding, and high-quality review.
- Guide best practices for Next.js/React, TypeScript, and modern styling (SCSS/Tailwind), including SSR/ISR decisions and Core Web Vitals performance.
- Oversee API/service design, data modelling, caching strategies, and third-party integrations to ensure consistency and quality.
LLM + RAG (product enablement)
- Guide design and delivery of LLM-enabled features, including RAG-style architectures where appropriate, and set standards for quality, safety, and maintainability.
- Ensure LLM features are safe, grounded, and useful through guardrails (validation, fallback behaviour, monitoring signals) and cost/performance optimisation (token efficiency, caching, rate limits).
- Help establish team standards for evaluation, quality, and operational monitoring of AI-enabled features.
Delivery enablement (CI/CD, platform awareness)
- Establish and improve pragmatic CI/CD and environment practices: Git workflows, build pipelines, release processes, and environment consistency.
- Ensure repository hygiene, documentation, and operational assets remain current (architecture docs, runbooks, diagrams).
- Partner on sensible deployment, monitoring, and operational practices. (This is not a dedicated DevOps role, but it does require strong platform literacy.)
About you
You are a senior engineering leader with a builder’s mindset. You balance speed with quality, and creativity with engineering discipline. You communicate clearly, make strong calls with incomplete information, and bring calm, structured leadership during delivery pressure or incidents. You care deeply about security, reliability, and maintainability—and you raise the team’s standards while enabling momentum.
Technical skills / experience
- Proven experience leading engineering teams (Tech Lead / Engineering Manager / Head of Development), including coaching, performance management; hiring experience is a plus
- Strong full-stack experience delivering production systems with Next.js/React and TypeScript, and solid back-end fundamentals (APIs/services, auth, data modelling, performance, security).
- Demonstrated ownership of architecture and delivery for multiple projects/products, with strong engineering governance (testing strategy, code reviews, release discipline).
- Experience establishing secure engineering foundations (identity/auth patterns, secrets/config management, dependency/vulnerability management practices) and partnering with relevant stakeholders on incident response and remediation.
- Experience building responsive, accessible, SEO-friendly experiences (HTML/CSS, W3C and accessibility standards).
- Strong stakeholder management: able to translate technical decisions into clear options and trade-offs for non-technical leaders.
AI / LLM (strong preference)
- Experience delivering, supporting, or integrating LLM-enabled features (RAG experience is a strong advantage), including practical considerations around cost, quality, and safety.
- Familiarity integrating LLM providers and vector databases, and implementing practical safety/monitoring guardrails.
Nice to have
- Exposure to cloud/edge platforms (e.g., Cloudflare/AWS/Azure) and modern data stores, including vector databases.
- Experience establishing developer experience tooling: shared libraries, monorepo patterns, internal platforms, templates, and standardised environments.
- Experience operating in an agency or multi-stakeholder environment with varied project types and fast timelines.
Ways of working
- Confident communication, both written and verbal; occasional client meetings may be required.
- Proactive approach and ability to work independently with strong ownership.
- Comfortable explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and collaborating across disciplines (design, delivery, accounts).
This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the responsibilities for this role. Other responsibilities may be added from time to time.
TEAM LEWIS is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating and fostering an environment focused on equality, empowerment and respect. We strive to create an inclusive workplace that supports and celebrates our diversity. We continue to invest in our efforts to ensure that TEAM LEWIS is a place where everyone can thrive.
