Technical Lead

Appnovation Technologies · London

About us

Appnovation is the AI Product Company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with teams around the world, Appnovation builds AI products, delivers enterprise AI and digital solutions, and co-invests with clients to bring new AI products to market.

Open source has been the foundation of Appnovation's work since 2007, and it remains the foundation underneath every AI product the company builds today. Appnovation teams work with organizations in highly regulated industries, including global leaders such as Pfizer, Google and AstraZeneca, to help them adopt AI they can govern and own.

About the role

We are hiring a UK-based Technical Lead to work with our existing global team and promote quality and excellence in our web-based solution delivery.

Our team builds and runs corporate and enterprise-scale web properties on a composable stack: headless CMS, Node and React front ends, and the integrations that connect them to the client's wider platform.

You will be the team's technical voice to the client as well as leading the development of your assigned projects. You will work with the team to translate business goals into a clear deliverable technical plan while communicating trade-offs, risk and progress to stakeholders.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will plan, code and review, while being accountable for the technical outcome of the project team.

What you will do

Technical direction and quality

Set the team's technical direction and own architecture and design decisions across the composable stack.
Select and justify the right headless CMS, front-end framework and hosting approach for each property, weighing editorial experience, performance, cost and lock-in.
Design content models and component libraries that scale across multiple brands, sites, regions and locales.
Uphold coding standards and best practices through consistent code review.
Ensure developers test their own work before it reaches QA, with automated testing and CI/CD in place.
Hold the team to clear standards for security, accessibility, search and performance (detailed below).

Web standards: accessibility, search and performance

Own accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA as a minimum, with awareness of the European Accessibility Act and UK public-sector regulations where they apply. Build it into components, content models and testing, combining automated tools (axe, Lighthouse) with manual keyboard and screen-reader checks.
Own technical SEO: semantic HTML, structured data (schema.org), metadata, canonicals, sitemaps, hreflang for multi-region sites, and redirect strategy during migrations.
Prepare properties for answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO), so content is structured, attributable and easy for AI search and assistants to find, understand and cite.
Set performance budgets and hold the team to Core Web Vitals targets (LCP, INP, CLS), using real-user monitoring as well as lab testing.
Build these checks into CI so regressions are caught before release, not after.

AI-assisted engineering

Lead a team working in a heavily AI-tooled environment, using coding assistants and agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or Cursor, and set clear rules for how they are used.
Preserve codebase quality: AI-generated code meets the same standards for review, testing, security and maintainability as hand-written code.
Keep people accountable: every change has an owner who understands it, and architecture decisions are not delegated to tools.
Maintain the guardrails that make AI output reliable, including linting, type checking, test coverage, documented conventions and context files the tools can follow.
Watch for AI-specific risks, such as client data or secrets in prompts, licence and IP concerns, and duplicated or inconsistent code.

Migrations and integrations

Plan and lead content and platform migrations from legacy or monolithic CMS platforms to headless, including content audits, mapping, transformation and URL redirect strategy.
Design repeatable migration and automation pipelines using n8n or similar tools, alongside custom Node scripts where needed.
Lead integration development between the CMS and the client's wider estate, such as CRM, DAM, PIM, search, analytics, marketing automation and identity.
Own API design, webhooks and event-driven patterns, with clear error handling, monitoring and rollback.

Documentation and knowledge sharing

Own documentation for architecture, content models, integrations, design decisions and technical specifications.
Turn one-to-one guidance into reusable material so onboarding and handoff don't depend on any one person.
Stay current on [client-specific compliance requirements, e.g. UK GDPR, cookie consent (PECR) and accessibility obligations].

Team leadership and mentoring

Break plans down into well-formed tasks and stories the team can act on.
Delegate work fairly and evenly across the team.
Coach and mentor developers to grow the team's capability in headless and composable delivery.

Client communication and stakeholder management

Serve as the client's primary contact for technical discussions.
Explain technical concepts, options and status to non-technical stakeholders, including marketing and content teams, in plain language.
Manage client expectations honestly on scope, effort and risk.

Delivery

Lead technical input to planning, estimation and backlog refinement.
Track progress against milestones and budget with the project manager.
Identify technical risks early, particularly around migration cut-over and third-party integrations, and escalate critical issues before they become surprises.

Commercial awareness

Seek client feedback and fold it into development cycles.
Spot genuine opportunities to add value for the client, and bring them to the account team.

What success looks like

Delegation is healthy. Work is spread across the team, not bottlenecked on you.
Documentation survives handoff. A new engineer can onboard and maintain the system from what is written down.
Migrations land cleanly. Content moves with no lost pages, broken links or SEO drop, and cut-overs happen on the planned date.
Standards are measurable. Properties meet WCAG 2.2 AA and Core Web Vitals targets, and are visible in both traditional and AI-driven search.
Quality holds as speed rises. AI tooling increases throughput without increasing defects, accessibility issues or performance regressions.
Editors are self-sufficient. Content teams can build and publish pages without developer help.
Integrations are reliable. Data flows between systems are monitored, and failures are caught before the client notices.
The client trusts you. Stakeholders route technical decisions through you.

What you bring

Required

8+ years in software development, including at least 2 years leading a team's technical direction.
A track record delivering corporate and enterprise-scale web properties: multi-site, multi-brand or multi-region platforms with high traffic, complex governance and many stakeholders.
Proven ability to turn a technical vision into a clear, actionable plan a team can execute.
Excellent communication with non-technical audiences.
Right to work in the UK.

Technical skills

Composable architecture: designing MACH-style (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) solutions and making sound build-versus-buy decisions.
Headless CMS: hands-on delivery with at least two of Sanity, Contentful, Builder.io, Strapi or Webflow, including content modelling, editorial workflows, localisation and preview.
React: strong production experience, ideally with Next.js or a similar framework, covering SSR, SSG and ISR rendering strategies.
Node.js and TypeScript: building APIs, serverless functions, middleware and scripts.
Migrations: leading content or platform migrations at scale, using n8n or similar automation tools (e.g. Make, Zapier, custom ETL) as well as scripted approaches.
Integration development: REST and GraphQL APIs, webhooks, authentication (OAuth, SSO) and connecting a CMS to CRM, DAM, PIM, search and analytics platforms.
Engineering practice: Git workflows, CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment to platforms such as Vercel, Netlify, AWS or Azure.
Accessibility: in-depth knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, ARIA and semantic HTML, with hands-on assistive-technology testing.
Search, AEO and GEO: technical SEO, structured data, and structuring content so it performs in AI-driven search and answer engines.
Performance: Core Web Vitals, performance budgets, caching and CDN strategy, and image, font and script optimisation.
AI-assisted development: daily, fluent use of AI coding tools, with the judgement to review, test and reject their output so the codebase stays clean and maintainable.

Nice to have

Consulting or agency experience, managing client relationships alongside delivery.
Experience establishing team practices from scratch on a new engagement.
Experience writing AI usage policies or engineering guidelines for a team.
Certifications or partner experience with Sanity, Contentful or other composable vendors.
Experience with commerce or search platforms in a composable stack (e.g. Shopify, commercetools, Algolia).
Familiarity with design systems and tools such as Storybook and Figma.

Thank you for your interest in a career with Appnovation Technologies! Please note that only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

At Appnovation, we recognize that diverse teams are the strongest teams. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is not only something that we embrace - we celebrate it! We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds, lived experiences and industries to apply. Come join us at Appnovation, and learn more about how we stay true to our company values as we build better lives through better digital.

Accommodations are available upon request throughout the recruitment process.

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