OnBuy
Engineering & Operations Lead
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OnCommerce – Engineering & Operations Lead
About 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 rapidly, launching new brands and scaling to power the future of ecommerce.
The Role: Why It Exists
The role exists to balance two critical demands:
- Protecting the present – Maintaining the resilience of the live platform while Handelsadministering everyday operations.
- Building the future – Oversseeing the transformation into a modern, composable architecture.
This leadership role ensures engineering standards remain intact, live delivery stays strong, and the organisation adapts smoothly while scaling.
Role Overview
You will lead a strong, high-performing engineering team, spanning both the existing platform and its transformation to a modern, composable architecture. As Engineering & Operations Lead, your responsibilities include:
- Defining clear ownership, tracking performance, and enforcing quality across squads.
- Partnering with Transformation and Solution Architecture teams to ensure live stability and progress.
- Managing both operational resilience and strategic engineering evolution.
Success demands balancing day-to-day delivery with long-term sustainability, driving accountability, and fostering a culture of ownership.
Key Responsibilities
Product Engineering Ownership & Accountability
- Define and enforce clear ownership boundaries, including by domain (Buyer/Seller/Platform).
- Hold every contributor accountable — regardless of whether they're permanent staff or partners.
- Track and report Throughput and Instability metrics per domain so standards remain visible and enforceable.
Transformation Continuity
- Ensure consistent delivery through disruptions like nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain moves, and headcount changes.
- Collaborate with the Transformation Lead to prevent structural changes from degrading live operations.
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Standards & Engineering Governance
- Own the engineering standards for both the current platform and the target state.
- Review the Transformation Lead’s roadmap to assess engineering-standard and operational impacts.
- Manage architectural transitions (legacy ↔ modern systems) to prevent legacy practices from leaking into new solutions.
People Leadership & Team Engagement
- Lead and develop engineering teams, including DevOps and platform functions.
- Coach Tech Leads to maintain consistent leadership standards across squads.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Identify capability gaps and support hiring, succession planning, and skills development.
- Oversee resource allocation, including capacity planning, on-call structures, and skills mix.
Operational Resilience & Incident Ownership
- Implement a two-tier incident resolution model:
- Ops on-call for standard issues and runbooks.
- Product Engineering squads (Buyer/Seller) for deeper technical challenges.
- Build rotational depth (minimum 3 engineers per domain or full-team coverage for smaller groups) to ensure 24/7 incident reliability.
- Drive a blameless Post-Incident Review culture, improving incident response continuously.
Security & Risk
- Embed secure coding practices, SAST/DAST scanning, and OWASP-aligned standards.
- Translate security risks** into business terms** (exposure, cost-to-fix, cost-of-neglect) and escalate appropriately.
Technical Debt Management
- Identify and manage technical debt in daily operations.
- Escalate trade-offs (rebuild vs. patch, roadmap sequencing) to the Solution Architecture Lead.
- Maintain visibility on strategic debt and prioritise remediation rather than strategic decisions.
Delivery & Execution
- Collaborate with Buyer & Seller Product Owners to scope and sequence engineering work.
- Own technical design and implementation choices while adhering to architectural patterns.
- Escalate decisions requiring Product Owner Heads’ sign-off only when necessary.
Essential Experience & Qualifications
- Strong full-stack engineering background, particularly with Laravel/PHP, capable of handling monolithic and microservices architectures.
- People leadership: Hiring, mentoring, and managing performance.
- Direct experience leading engineering transformations, including team restructuring, process redesign, or architectural shifts, while ensuring a live revenue platform remained stable.
- Expertise in:
- API design and system architecture.
- Production environments: MySQL, Couchbase (or MongoDB), Redis.
- GCP experiences, including large-scale production deployments.
- Experience balancing legacy system maintenance with parallel transformation projects.
- Startup or scale-up experience, comfortable with ambiguity and limited resource constraints.
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Desirable Experience
- Firsthand experience with a MACH (Micro Frontends Architecture) or composable architecture migration, preferably on a trade-minded, revenue-generating platform (not greenfield).
- Multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic knowledge to confidently compare GCP and alternatives.
- Flexibility in beyond PHP technologies (e.g., Node.js, Go, Python) as needed for futureproofing.
Salary & Benefits
Salary
- Up to £100k per year, depending on experience.
Benefits
- Company equity: Align yourself with the organisation by owning a stake in OnCommerce.
- Leave: 25 days annual leave + Bank Holidays + 1 extra Birthday day.
- Employee Assistance Programme (EAP).
- Flexible rewards platform (Perks at Work), covering everything from mental health to fitness.
- Career development: Opportunities to develop and progress at the organisation.
Work Arrangement
The role is either UK remote or hybrid, with the flexibility to operate from or near our Manchester or Bournemouth offices.
Commitment to Equality & Inclusivity
OnCommerce is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to a fair, inclusive environment and a recruitment process free of bias based on:
- Gender, race, nationality, disability, age, religion, socioeconomic background, or other protected characteristics.
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