This is a new, senior and highly influential role within the Engineering team. You will sit alongside our Lead Analytics Engineer as an equal-seniority counterpart, owning the platform, application and developer-experience side of Apollo, while working closely with the Head of Data & Engineering on overall architecture and long-term direction.

We’re looking for a hands-on, Python-first engineer who enjoys operating at both strategic and implementation levels: writing production code, setting standards, making technical decisions, and creating an environment where other engineers can do their best work. This is not a JavaScript-led “full-stack” role but you should be comfortable building user-facing applications and unafraid of frontends.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

Platform & Application Engineering

• Accountable for the technical quality, structure and evolution of all non-data components of the Apollo platform.
• Responsible for leading the design and development of our core applications and internal tools, including multiple production UIs built using Python-centric stacks (e.g. FastAPI, Jinja, HTMX, Tailwind).
• Responsible for making and guiding implementation decisions across backend services, APIs and application architecture.
• Contribute directly to production code, setting the standard for quality, readability and pragmatism.
• Accountable for overall security, ensuring the platform, applications, infrastructure and developer workflow follow best-practice security guidelines and evolve in line with standards, including working with our innovation team to ensure a secure approach to AI assistants and agents.

Infrastructure, CI/CD & Developer Workflow

• Accountable for the health, reliability and scalability of Apollo’s infrastructure and deployment pipelines.
• Responsible for shaping and maintaining our CI/CD processes, testing strategy and release workflows.
• Responsible for ensuring local development, build and deployment workflows are efficient, repeatable and well-understood.
• Proactively identify opportunities to simplify tooling, reduce friction and improve developer productivity.

Technical Leadership & Decision-Making

• Act as the primary technical decision-maker for platform and application work, consulting with the Head of Data & Engineering on architectural direction.
• Responsible for conducting thorough code reviews and ensuring all platform-side changes meet our quality bar before merging.
• Provide day-to-day technical leadership to senior engineers, with offshore engineers accountable into this role.
• Responsible for balancing delivery with sustainability, ensuring technical debt is visible and actively managed.

Engineering Standards & Best Practice

• Accountable for adherence to engineering standards across platform codebases, including testing, documentation and code organisation.
• Responsible for evolving those standards over time, protecting core principles while adapting to new tools and approaches.
• Ensure appropriate observability, logging and error-handling patterns are in place across applications.
• Responsible for ensuring documentation exists where it adds long-term value, and remains accurate.

Problem Solving & Collaboration

• Accountable for identifying, communicating and resolving complex technical problems across the platform.
• Responsible for fostering a culture of clear thinking, calm debugging and fixing root causes rather than symptoms.
• Collaborate closely with analytics engineers, product stakeholders and users to ensure platform capabilities support real needs.
• Act as a visible ambassador for Apollo’s engineering discipline across the wider business.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING TO THE ROLE

Must Have Skills

• Significant experience as a senior or lead software / platform engineer, with a track record of owning systems end-to-end.
• Deep proficiency in Python, including building production APIs, services and applications.
• Experience building user-facing applications, even if frontend is not your primary specialism.
• Strong understanding of modern backend architecture, infrastructure and cloud-native systems.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows and test strategies.
• Confidence making technical decisions and standing behind them, while remaining collaborative and open to challenge.
• Proven experience leading other engineers through code review, coaching and technical direction.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with a methodical and pragmatic approach to debugging and system design.
• Comfort working in evolving environments where priorities change and ambiguity exists.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience with FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and cloud platforms.
• Familiarity with lightweight frontend approaches (e.g. server-rendered HTML, HTMX, utility-first CSS).
• Experience supporting data-heavy or analytics-driven platforms.

At Medialab we are committed to fostering a culture that celebrates creative thinking, different perspectives and the many different cultures that exist. We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds and identities. All qualified applicants will receive fair consideration, regardless of age, disability, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, belief, marital status, social mobility or any other protected characteristic. If you require any reasonable adjustments to make our recruitment process more accessible for you, please reach out to our Head of Talent Acquisition and Inclusion at Kianna.Briggs@medialabgroup.co.uk. Requesting a reasonable adjustment will not affect your application.