Lead JavaScript Engineer - Encore Musicians

Encore Musicians

Encore Musicians is a company that was recently acquired by Mixcloud and is one of the world’s leading online platforms for booking live musicians, bands, and DJs. Since 2014, we’ve helped over 50,000 clients bring live music to life’s biggest moments, from weddings to corporate events, and more. We’re passionate about supporting musicians and have helped them earn over £27 million through Encore gigs. By joining Encore, you’ll be joining a bright, friendly and ambitious team on a mission to bring more great live music into the world.

Encore was acquired by Mixcloud in Autumn 2024, which has marked the beginning of an exciting new chapter in our story. Together, we’re solving meaningful challenges in our industry such as, how can we make live music accessible to everyone while enabling musicians to build sustainable careers? And how do we make the booking process an intuitive and enjoyable digital experience? We're excited to execute these ideas and are looking for an experienced engineer to join us on the journey.

The Role

We're looking for a Lead Engineer to join our small, full-stack engineering team. You'll be working alongside our other Senior Engineer as one of just two developers responsible for the entire Encore platform — from the customer-facing web app to our React Native mobile app, backend services, and infrastructure.

You'll join at a pivotal moment: we're mid-way through launching Encore in the USA, evolving our core product, and rolling out a rebrand across the site. There's a lot of green-field, high-impact work on the table, alongside the day-to-day of keeping a live, revenue-generating marketplace running smoothly.

What You’ll Do

• Transform Encore into a more focused, intuitive self-serve platform for both musicians and customers, making it seamless and delightful to use.
• Bring systems-level understanding and stewardship of strategy to the tech/product team (and across the company)
• Pastoral mentorship of another full-stack engineer
• Maintenance of our tech infrastructure (keeping downtime to a minimum, and fixing critical bugs/team requests in a prioritised and timely manner)
• Continuous formation/refinement of tech projects of strategic importance (e.g, tech debt, stack modernisation)
• Deliver on the release cadence for tech/product projects of strategic importance
• Improve Encore key features including messenger, job listings, search and musician admin panels
• Continued build-out of the USA platform — SEO landing pages, musician-side functionality, and bringing the US experience up to parity with the UK platform
• Keep technical output closely and visibly aligned with commercial priorities, and always identify the highest-impact work and the next bottleneck to remove
• Keep the platform reliable — minimising downtime and resolving critical bugs and team requests in a timely, well-prioritised way
• Work with bespoke payment integrations, including Stripe for the US market
• Reduce tech debt on an ongoing basis — including migrating toward a more formalised meta framework and moving our WordPress blog off Digital Ocean and onto Railway

Who you are:

• Lead-level engineering ownership in a production software environment
• Strong full-stack experience with TypeScript/JavaScript — comfortable across the stack rather than specialised in just one layer
• Experience with React for frontend and Node.js/Express for backend services
• Comfort moving between frontend web work and infrastructure/DevOps tasks (containers, cloud configuration) — at Encore, engineers regularly jump between the two
• Experience working with AI-assisted coding tools, such as Claude Code Skills, MCP servers and Routines.
• A product and commercial mindset: the ability to weigh technical work against business impact, prioritise ruthlessly, and know what to cut to ship faster
• Strong communication skills — you'll work closely with product, design, non-technical stakeholders, and leadership on technical priorities across the company
• Comfort operating with autonomy as an individual contributor; we don't micro-manage, and you'll be trusted to make day-to-day technical decisions independently
• Experience with (or willingness to quickly get up to speed on) our stack: React Native/Expo, Railway, GitHub (incl. CI and end-to-end testing), Playwright, Vite/Vitest, Google Cloud, AWS, Twilio, and Stripe
• Eligible to work in the United Kingdom

Nice to Have:

• TanStack Start/Router experience
• A passion for music — not essential, but the whole team shares a genuine love of it, and many of us are musicians or DJs ourselves
• Experience working in a two-sided marketplace business
• Experience navigating a codebase that has evolved and grown over several years, with an eye for where to simplify, unify, or replace legacy pieces
• Degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

What Makes This Role Special

• Zero-to-one impact: Be at the forefront of solving some of the music industry’s most intriguing challenges.
• Real problem-solving: You’ll work on complex, meaningful challenges that impact thousands of musicians and event organisers.
• True ownership: Take the lead in shaping product direction and enjoy a high level of autonomy in your work.
• Direct impact: Work in a small, dynamic team where your contributions directly affect our users’ experiences.