Lead Product Engineer - Football

Our client is looking to appoint its first in house Lead Product Engineer to take full ownership of the platform behind a fast growing prize competitions business.
Our client runs prize competitions for football supporters, giving them the chance to win football prizes and merchandise. It is a profitable and fast growing business with a large and loyal football following, built on strong product instinct, speed and real football knowledge. Football supporters love what it does and they keep coming back. The whole business runs on its platform. This is the first engineering hire, bringing that capability in house so that ideas can move from concept to live product quickly.
The role
This is not a website maintenance role. The business wants a builder, someone who enjoys creating products and turning ideas into reality. Roughly 70% of the role is product development, building new customer facing features, new games and mechanics, checkout and customer account improvements. It also covers the internal tools and dashboards behind them. Around 20% is platform ownership, covering hosting, deployments, server health, security, backups and third party integrations. The remaining 10% is technical planning with the CEO, scoping projects, estimating the work and challenging ideas with better solutions. One month you might build a new game. The next you might redesign the Prize Portal.
What you will bring
* Front end. HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with modern frameworks such as React or Vue.
* Back end. PHP. Solid experience working within an existing PHP codebase is equally welcome, along with APIs, authentication and business logic.
* Databases. MySQL, database design and query optimisation.
* Platform. Linux servers, cloud hosting such as AWS, deployments, security and monitoring.
* Integrations. Payment gateways, email systems, APIs and third party software.
* Modern tooling. The business actively embraces modern development tooling. You should be comfortable using tools that improve productivity and code quality.
The person
* A builder rather than a maintainer. Someone who gets excited about creating new products, not simply keeping existing systems running.
* Takes ownership and solves problems independently, without needing detailed instructions for every task.
* Communicates clearly and can explain technical concepts to people who are not technical. You will work directly with a founder who is not from a technical background.
* Commercially minded, caring about the customer experience and about the football supporters who use the product rather than only the code.
What is on offer
* A competitive salary, depending on experience.
* Full ownership of the platform as the first engineering hire.
* Direct access to the founder and real influence over what gets built.
* The potential to become the foundation of a small product engineering team as the business grows.
* Possible discretionary bonus to be agreed.
Location
Leeds based and office based, with the possibility of some hybrid working.
Our client is an equal opportunities employer
Only candidates based in UK and eligible to work in UK are allowed