Rest Less UK
Head of Technology and Engineering
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About Us
Rest Less is a social impact business with a mission to help and inspire today’s generation of people over 50 get the most from life.
With over 1 million registered members across the UK, we bring together advice, inspiration and opportunities across work, money, travel, health, lifestyle and more. We also champion age-inclusivity and challenge outdated stereotypes of this large but chronically overlooked and under-represented audience.
Technology underpins how we serve our members and create value for our commercial partners. From helping people discover relevant content, jobs and holidays to delivering intelligent, personalised communications and measuring campaign performance, the quality of our platform directly affects our business.
We’re a small but talented team, with a large audience and plenty of scope for innovation. Joining as our most senior technology leader, you’ll have the opportunity to shape how we do that: working directly with the CEO, staying close to the engineering, and making decisions that have a visible impact on our members, partners and colleagues.
About You
You’re an experienced, well-rounded engineering leader who thrives in a small, fast-moving environment where you can have real ownership and visible impact. You enjoy setting technical direction, but you’re equally comfortable getting into the details and working alongside engineers to solve problems, make pragmatic decisions and keep delivery moving.
You combine strong technical judgement with a commercial mindset. You understand when to build, buy, improve or simplify, and you’re comfortable balancing reliability, security, scalability and cost against the needs of the business.
You’re a clear communicator and collaborative leader who can translate between technical and non-technical teams, explain trade-offs without unnecessary complexity, and bring structure and momentum to ambiguous problems. You care about building a strong engineering culture, developing people and creating technology that works well for both our members and the wider business.
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The Role
This is the most senior engineering role in the business, so you will report directly to the CEO. Your work will be visible, and you will have a real say in where we go next.
You will own our technology end to end: what we build, how it runs, what it costs and how secure it is. It is a hands-on role. You will lead our engineers, set the standards you build to together, and still be close enough to the code to review it, unblock it and write it when it counts.
You will turn commercial goals into technical plans, explain the trade-offs in plain language, and make sure the numbers our clients rely on are right.
Our Platform
A modern, cloud-native platform on AWS that you can shape, not just maintain. It powers what we offer our audience and our partners:
Content
Our website and the tools, articles and guides our audience comes to us for.
Travel
Holidays and travel deals from our partners, gathered automatically and curated in-house.
Jobs
Job listings and search, connecting our audience with employers.
Partnerships and advertising
Campaigns for our brand partners, with tracking and monthly performance reporting that shows them the value they get.
Behind it sit our customer engagement platform, which drives the emails our audience receives, a data platform that keeps our reporting accurate, the internal tools our colleagues run the business with, and a cloud setup built on infrastructure as code, automated delivery and observability.
What You Will Do
- Set the direction
Own the architecture and technical roadmap. Decide what to build, buy, modernise or retire.
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Lead delivery
Plan the work, keep it moving, and stay hands-on in design, code review and implementation. -
Raise the bar
Set and evolve the engineering standards and practices we work to. -
Protect data quality
Be accountable for the accuracy of client reporting and the health of the pipelines behind it. -
Keep things running
Own reliability, monitoring, on-call and incident response. -
Facilitate integration of AI
Help to design the ways in which tech and the wider team are able to leverage AI capabilities and accelerate progress and innovation, ensuring that we do this in a way that maintains appropriate quality and security. -
Spend wisely
Own cloud and supplier costs, and find savings without cutting corners. -
Keep us secure
Own our security and compliance, including access management, penetration testing and Cyber Essentials. -
Manage suppliers
Look after our technology partners and renewals. -
Develop our engineers
Lead and mentor them, and hire when we need to. -
Partner with the business
Work with the CEO and colleagues across commercial, content and client work. Turn their ideas into well-scoped work, and keep everyone informed on progress and risks.
Our Stack
Languages
TypeScript (Node.js), Python, PHP, SQL
Cloud
AWS: Lambda, ECS, EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, SNS, SQS, EventBridge
Data
MySQL, PostgreSQL, S3, AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, Athena, Airbyte
Search
Algolia, Google Talent Solution, Vertex
Customer engagement
Blueshift
Analytics and reporting
Metabase, Google Analytics
Monitoring and on-call
CloudWatch, Grafana, PagerDuty
Infrastructure and delivery
AWS CDK, Terraform, Cloudflare, Bitbucket Pipelines
Front end
React, WordPress
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