OnBuy
Engineering & Operations Lead
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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 fast, launching new brands and scaling to power the future of ecommerce.
Be Part of the Story
OnCommerce is constantly evolving. Everyone here plays a hands-on role in shaping what comes next, building brands that make an impact across global markets. There’s no red tape or rigid corporate structure; just smart people taking ownership and figuring things out as we build something big together. The pace is fast, priorities shift, things aren’t always perfectly set up, and you’ll often need to get stuck in and solve problems. But if you thrive in that kind of environment, you’ll have real influence, real 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, every day, across Buyer and Seller domains. This dual demand—build the future, protect the present—doesn’t run itself. This role exists to hold both at once: the standard the engineering team is held to, the resilience of what's live today, and the continuity of delivery and culture as the organisation restructures around it.
Role Overview: Engineering & Operations Lead
This is a senior leadership role, accountable for the day-to-day performance and long-term evolution of OnCommerce’s engineering function, spanning both the current platform and its transformation to a modern, composable architecture.
The Engineering & Operations Lead owns:
- Engineering delivery
- Operational resilience
- Standards across all squads
Working alongside the Transformation and Solution Architecture Leads, this role balances live operations with platform evolution, ensuring neither stability nor progress is compromised.
Success in this role requires:
- Leading people
- Setting clear expectations
- Driving accountability for outcomes
- Making effective trade-offs between short-term delivery and long-term sustainability
Key Responsibilities
Product Engineering Ownership & Accountability
- Define and enforce clear ownership boundaries across the engineering team, by domain (Buyer / Seller / Platform), holding every contributor accountable regardless of their sourcing model (permanent or partner-led)
- Track and report Throughput and Instability per domain, ensuring standards are visible and enforceable—not aspirational
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Transformation Continuity
- Hold delivery consistent through any disruption caused by transformation (e.g., nearshore/offshore onboarding, domain moves, headcount changes)
- Partner with the Transformation Lead to ensure structural change doesn’t degrade live delivery
Standards & Engineering Governance
- Own the engineering standard across both the current platform and the target state
- Review the Transformation Lead’s roadmap for engineering-standard and operational impact before commitments are made
- Guard against legacy practices and assumptions leaking into the new platform, ensuring both modern and legacy architectures coexist efficiently during migration
People Leadership & Team Engagement
- Lead and develop engineering capability across squads (including DevOps and platform functions)
- Coach and support Tech Leads to build consistent leadership standards across teams
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
- Identify capability gaps and support hiring, development, and succession planning
- Own resource planning, including capacity, skills mix, and on-call structure
Operational Resilience & Incident Ownership
- Establish and run a two-tier resolver model:
- Ops on-call for standard support and runbook-driven issues
- Product Engineering (Buyer/Seller) as the resolver group for genuine engineering problems
- Build rota depth (minimum 3 engineers per domain or full team where smaller) to ensure resolution doesn’t depend on any one individual
- Drive a blameless Post-Incident Review culture, building on the existing Incident Management SOP
Security & Risk
- Embed secure coding practice, SAST/DAST scanning, and OWASP-aligned standards into the engineering definition of done
- Surface security risks in business terms (exposure vs cost to carry) and route decisions to the appropriate decision-maker rather than carrying them unilaterally
Technical Debt Management
- Identify, log, and manage technical debt within day-to-day delivery
- Escalate strategic trade-offs (rebuild vs patch, roadmap sequencing) to the Solution Architecture Lead, owning visibility and routine remediation
Delivery & Execution
- Work with Product Owners (Buyer and Seller) to translate roadmap items into scoped, sequenced engineering execution
- Own technical design and implementation choices day-to-day, operating within established architectural patterns without requiring sign-off for routine work
- Escalate to Product Owner Heads when scope or trade-off decisions exceed their remit
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Requirements
Essential
- Strong full-stack engineering background with Laravel/PHP, comfortable across monolith and microservices patterns
- People leadership experience in hiring, mentoring, performance management
- Direct experience leading an engineering transformation, restructuring teams, processes, or architecture, while keeping a live, revenue-generating platform running throughout
- Strong API design and system architecture experience
- Production experience with MySQL, Couchbase or MongoDB, and Redis
- Experience deploying and operating live services at scale on GCP
- Proven ability to balance legacy support against parallel investment in target architecture
- Startup or scale-up experience, comfortable operating with ambiguity and limited resources
Desirable
- Experience with a MACH or composable architecture migration on a live, trading platform (not greenfield campaign), including pain points like data consistency, search/catalogue re-platforming, and vendor lock-in risk
- Multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic experience with an informed view on GCP vs alternatives (beyond default loyalty)
- Comfortable adopting beyond PHP where the future stack demands it (e.g., Node.js, Go, Python)
Benefits
- Salary up to £100k per annum, depending on experience
- Company Equity – Ownership in the business as OnCommerce grows
- 25 days annual leave + Bank Holidays
- +1 extra day off for your Birthday
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Perks at Work benefit platform access
- Career development and progression opportunities
This role is remote or hybrid, with the condition to live near our Manchester or Bournemouth offices.
Our Commitment
OnCommerce is an equal opportunities employer. We’re committed to a fair and transparent recruitment process, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of:
- Gender, sexual orientation, or marital/civil partnership status
- Pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment
- Race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin
- Religion or belief, disability, or age
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