Lead JavaScript Engineer

Responsibilities

• Transform Encore into a more focused, intuitive self-serve platform for both musicians and customers, making it seamless and delightful to use.
• Bring systems-level understanding and stewardship of strategy to the tech/product team (and across the company)
• Pastoral mentorship of another full-stack engineer
• Maintenance of our tech infrastructure (keeping downtime to a minimum, fixing critical bugs and team requests in a prioritised and timely manner)
• Continuous formation/refinement of tech projects of strategic importance (e.g., tech debt, stack modernisation)
• Deliver on the release cadence for tech/product projects of strategic importance
• Improve Encore key features including messenger, job listings, search and musician admin panels
• Continued build-out of the USA platform — SEO landing pages, musician-side functionality, and bringing the US experience up to parity with the UK platform
• Keep technical output closely and visibly aligned with commercial priorities, and always identify the highest‑impact work and the next bottleneck to remove
• Keep the platform reliable — minimising downtime and resolving critical bugs and team requests in a timely, well‑prioritised way
• Work with bespoke payment integrations, including Stripe for the US market
• Reduce tech debt on an ongoing basis — including migrating toward a more formalised meta framework and moving our WordPress blog off Digital Ocean and onto Railway

Requirements

• Lead-level engineering ownership in a production software environment
• Strong full‑stack experience with TypeScript/JavaScript — comfortable across the stack rather than specialised in just one layer
• Experience with React for frontend and Node.js/Express for backend services
• Comfort moving between frontend web work and infrastructure/DevOps tasks (containers, cloud configuration) — at Encore, engineers regularly jump between the two
• Experience working with AI‑assisted coding tools, such as Claude Code Skills, MCP servers and Routines.
• A product and commercial mindset: the ability to weigh technical work against business impact, prioritise ruthlessly, and know what to cut to ship faster
• Strong communication skills — you'll work closely with product, design, non-technical stakeholders, and leadership on technical priorities across the company
• Comfort operating with autonomy as an individual contributor; we don't micro‑manage, and you'll be trusted to make day‑to‑day technical decisions independently
• Experience with (or willingness to quickly get up to speed on) our stack: React Native/Expo, Railway, GitHub (incl. CI and end‑to‑end testing), Playwright, Vite/Vitest, Google Cloud, AWS, Twilio, and Stripe
• Eligible to work in the United Kingdom

Core Competencies

Demonstrates strong full-stack engineering capabilities with expertise in TypeScript, JavaScript, React, and Node.js/Express, while effectively balancing technical work with business impact. Proven ability to mentor, prioritise tasks, and maintain a reliable tech infrastructure in a production environment.