Engineering Lead - Sports Platform

Job description

**🚀 Why Midnite?** Midnite is a next-generation sports betting and gaming platform built for a new wave of players. We combine sharp product thinking, bold brand, and fast execution to create experiences that feel modern, intuitive, and built for how people actually play today. Over 400,000 players have already made the move, and we’re only just getting started. We’re a high-performance team operating at pace. High ownership. Constant iteration. No hiding behind processes. We move quickly, test relentlessly, and turn ambitious ideas into real impact. If you’re driven, creative, and thrive in fast-moving environments where you can shape meaningful outcomes - keep reading. Not your grandad’s bookie. The Sports Group owns Midnite’s sportsbook experience - from discovering sports and markets to building, placing and tracking bets, cashing out and settlement. We build customer-facing products, critical backend services and the trading and operational tools that power them, working closely with Product, Design and Trading to expand our sports offering and make complex, real-time betting systems feel simple, fast and reliable. Within the group, the Sportsbook Platform team is modernising the tools behind that experience through an improved back office and practical use of AI, helping our trading team work more efficiently, reduce manual effort and gain greater control over the sportsbook. We’re looking for an Engineering Lead to provide hands-on technical leadership while formally managing and developing a team of three to four engineers. This is not a conventional Engineering Manager role or a purely technical lead position: you’ll create PRs, write production code and release features while setting technical direction and helping the whole team perform at its best. You’ll bring deep backend experience and a full-stack, systems-thinking mindset, understanding how clients, APIs, services, data, infrastructure, operations and third-party integrations work together. You’ll work closely with Product, Design and the trading team to turn complex or ambiguous problems into simple, reliable experiences delivered incrementally. Your impact will be measured not only by what you build, but by the quality of the team’s technical decisions, delivery and growth. ### **You will:** - **Technical direction:** Set pragmatic technical direction and lead system design across clients, APIs, services, data, infrastructure and integrations. - **Hands-on engineering:** Create PRs, write production code and release features, alongside contributing technical designs, investigations and reviews. - **Product delivery:** Work with Product and Design to turn ambiguous opportunities into clear milestones, small deliverables and frequent releases. - **People leadership:** Manage three to four engineers through clear expectations, one-to-ones, feedback, performance management and development support. - **Coaching:** Develop engineers through design discussions, reviews, pairing, debugging and production incidents without becoming a bottleneck. - **Engineering quality:** Champion effective testing, observability, safe releases and strong production feedback loops. - **Technical judgement:** Make sensible trade-offs, keep risks visible and help the team improve systems following production problems. - **Wider contribution:** Use AI responsibly and contribute to hiring, onboarding and shared engineering practices. ### **The next Midniter:** - Significant backend engineering experience, including time operating at senior or lead level. - Deep backend expertise with a full-stack, systems-thinking mindset across clients, APIs, services, data, infrastructure and operations. - Strong Python skills, or experience with another modern backend language and a willingness to learn Python. - Experience setting technical direction and designing, delivering and operating reliable systems. - Experience in formally managing engineers, or strong evidence of readiness to own one-to-ones, feedback, performance and development for a team of three to four. - Challenge assumptions constructively, helping Product and Design find simpler or more effective ways to achieve the intended outcome and the ability to break ambiguous, complex work into simple, safe deliverables. - Solid database and production-engineering fundamentals, including AWS, CI/CD and observability. - You communicate with energy and clarity, bring others into technical discussions, and help create momentum across the team. ### **💰 Winnings** - Private health insurance with zero excess, including optical cover and optional dental. - Income protection to protect your earnings and give you peace of mind. - Tenure holiday policy. After three years you receive an extra two days leave, increasing to 30 days annually after five years. - Flexible working and a fully supported home office setup so you can do your best work from home. - Nursery salary sacrifice scheme helping parents save thousands each year on nursery fees. - Salary sacrifice schemes for tech and holidays so you can spread the cost of the things you want. - Retail discounts and subscription perks across a wide range of brands. - Quarterly team socials to connect, celebrate and have fun together. At Midnite, we’re committed to creating equal opportunities for everyone. We actively strive to build balanced teams that reflect the diversity of our communities, including ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, the LGBTQIA+ community, and all genders. We aim to provide an inclusive and supportive interview experience for all candidates. If you require any reasonable adjustments, please let us know in advance so we can ensure you feel comfortable and set up for success.