Spruce

Lead Full Stack Engineer

Spruce

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: London • 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

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Salary

💰 £85,000 - £120,000 per year

Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

JavaScriptTypeScript

About the role

  • Own architecture and technical strategy for a core domain or set of systems.
  • Design, guide, and build complex, cross-cutting solutions that span multiple parts of the product.
  • Write high-leverage code: reference implementations, critical paths, foundational frameworks.
  • Lead technical discussions, make trade-offs explicit, and help teams align.
  • Mentor senior engineers and develop others into technical leaders.
  • Coach engineers in *how* to make decisions, rather than making every decision yourself.
  • Proactively identify scaling risks, bottlenecks, and areas of technical debt — and drive solutions.
  • Depending on your background, you may:
  • Be stepping into your first formal lead role from a senior IC position, or
  • Have already led teams successfully and want to stay close to the technical work
  • Either way, we’ll support you in growing your leadership scope over time.

Requirements

  • We care less about titles and more about impact, judgment, and intent.
  • You’ll likely have experience with:
  • Modern JavaScript / TypeScript and frontend frameworks
  • Backend development and API design
  • Relational databases and data modelling
  • Solving ambiguous, real-world problems end-to-end
  • Mentoring and/or building healthy, high-trust teams
  • But more importantly, you are:
  • Product-minded — you want to understand real users and real problems, not just tickets
  • Impact-driven — you balance technical quality with momentum and know when “good enough” is exactly right
  • Comfortable with ownership — you take responsibility for outcomes, not just code
  • Candid and collaborative — you challenge ideas openly, receive feedback well, and optimise for the team over ego
  • Whether you’re growing into seniority or already operating at staff/lead level, you’ll find space here to do the best work of your career.
  • …and you’ll hopefully also love heat pumps! 🤓
Benefits
  • 💰 Salary (depending on experience, impact, and location): £85–120k
  • 🍰 Meaningful slice of equity (options) in the company
  • 🏖️ 33 days holiday and opportunity to work from abroad for another 30 days each year
  • 🏡 Hybrid working: Min. 2 days in-person a week (London or Bristol)
  • 👧 Workplace Nursery Benefit scheme (YellowNest)
  • 🚲 Cycle to Work scheme
  • 🤝 Full-team meetups every fortnight with paid travel, accommodation and dinner
  • 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Brilliant team to learn from and massive opportunity to grow

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard skills
JavaScriptTypeScriptfrontend frameworksbackend developmentAPI designrelational databasesdata modellingscaling riskstechnical debtreference implementations
Soft skills
mentoringleadershipdecision-makingcollaborationimpact-drivenownershipcandid communicationproblem-solvingteam buildingtrust building