OnBuy
Engineering & Operations Lead
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OnCommerce: Senior Engineering & Operations Lead
Who are OnCommerce?
OnCommerce is a global selling platform that powers a growing network of retail channels, including:
- OnBuy – The only marketplace in the world to give customers instant Cashback on everything
- easyShop – An all-new marketplace created in collaboration with the easy® family of brands
- Comet – The iconic UK tech brand making its return later this year
OnCommerce is growing fast, launching new brands and scaling to power the future of ecommerce.
Be Part of the Story
At OnCommerce, we evolve quickly. Everyone plays a hands-on role in shaping the future—building brands that make an impact. There’s no red tape or rigid structures, just smart people taking ownership and solving problems. The pace is fast, priorities shift, and you’ll often need to get hands-on. If this environment excites you, you’ll have real influence, ownership, and the chance to grow with a rapidly scaling business.
Why This Role Exists
OnCommerce is transforming its platform and operating model while continuing to trade live across Buyer and Seller domains. Achieving both—balancing standards, resilience, and delivery with cultural continuity—requires leadership. This role ensures:
- The engineering team meets performance expectations
- Resilience is maintained while evolving to a modern, composable architecture
- Because the transformation introduces disruption, delivery must remain steady
- Restructuring aligns with operational excellence
Role Overview
This is a senior leadership position accountable for:
- Engineering delivery, operational resilience, and technical standards across all squads
- Navigating the balance between live operations and platform evolution
- Visible ownership for consistency, results, and continuity during a agile transition period
You’ll work closely with the Transformation and Solution Architecture Leads to ensure both stability and progress.
Expect this role to: ✔ Define and enforce accountability across domains ✔ Track delivery metrics (throughput, instability) transparently ✔ Balance live trade performance with architectural advancements ✔ Lead people and processes towards scalable, high-performance engineering
Key Responsibilities
Product Engineering Ownership & Accountability
- Clearly define ownership boundaries across Buyer / Seller / Platform domains
- Enforce accountability for delivery—regardless of whether contributors are permanent staff or partners
- Track and report Throughput & Instability per domain to make standards visible and actionable
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Transformation Continuity
- Maintain resilient delivery through nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain shifts, and headcount changes
- Ensure structural changes don’t compromise live operations
- Partner with the Transformation Lead to align strategic shifts with steady execution
Standards & Engineering Governance
- Establish and uphold engineering standards across current and future platforms
- Review roadmaps for engineering-standard and operational resilience impacts before commitments
- Grade advocated architectural coexistence during migration, preventing legacy habits from influencing the new system
People Leadership & Team Engagement
- Lead and develop engineering capability—including DevOps and platform teams
- Coach Tech Leads to achieve consistent leadership standards across squads
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability and continuous improvement
- Identify capability gaps and drive hiring, development, and succession planning
- Own resource planning (capacity, skills, on-call structure)
Operational Resilience & Incident Ownership
- Implement a two-tier resolver model:
- Ops on-call for standard and runbook-based incidents
- Product Engineering Teams (Buyer/Seller) for complex engineering issues
- Build rotation depth (minimum 3 engineers per domain where possible)
- Drive post-incident review culture that’s genuinely blameless, refining incident management processes
Security & Risk
- Embed secure coding practices (OWASP alignment, SAST/DAST scanning)
- Articulate security risk in business terms for decision-making, rather than risk retention without dialogue
- Escalate risks appropriately to decision-makers
Technical Debt Management
- Identify, log, and manage technical debt in day-to-day delivery
- Escalate strategic trade-offs (e.g. rebuild vs. patch) to the Solution Architecture Lead, ensuring visibility and remediation rather than leaving strategic questions
Delivery & Execution
- Collaborate with Product Owners (Buyer and Seller) to translate roadmaps into clear engineering execution
- Own day-to-day design and technical choices within established architectural patterns
- Escalate decisions where scope or trade-offs exceed the Product Owner’s remit
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Requirements
Essential
- Strong full-stack engineering background with Laravel/PHP; experience across monoliths and microservices
- Demonstrable leadership in hiring, mentoring, and performance management
- Direct experience leading an engineering transformation while keeping a live, revenue-generating platform operational
- Strong API design and system architecture prowess
- Production experience with MySQL, Couchbase or MongoDB, and Redis
- Full-scale deployment and operational experience on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Experience balancing legacy maintenance alongside modern architecture evolution
- Startup or scale-up background, comfortable with ambiguity and resource constraints
Desirable
- Personal experience migrating a MACH or composable architecture on a live, trading system (not greenfield)—including pain points like data consistency, search/catalog re-platforming, and vendor lock-in risks
- Multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic expertise, with an informed view on GCP vs. alternatives
- Willingness to extend beyond PHP (e.g. Node.js, Go, Python) when future needs arise
Benefits
- Salary: Up to £100,000 per annum (depending on experience)
- Equity: Significant company share awards
- Leave: 25 days + bank holidays, plus 1 extra birthday day off
- Support: Employee Assistance Programme
- Perks: Perks at Work platform to improve work/life balance
- Career Growth: Opportunities for development and progression
- Flexibility: This role is based in the UK, and available as remote or hybrid (Manchester/Bournemouth office access)
Our Commitment
OnBuy is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to a fair and transparent recruitment process, preventing any discrimination based on:
- Gender
- Sexual orientation
- Marital/civil partner status
- Pregnancy or maternity
- Gender reassignment
- Race/colour/nationality/ethnicity
- Religion or belief
- Disability
- Age
A note on candidate communications: We never use WhatsApp or any messaging apps to contact candidates. If anybody does, please inform the recruitment team.
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