Lead Engineer - United Kingdom

Job description

ABOUT KIRA Our mission is to make money smart, reliable and within reach for everyone. In 2019, we built the first mobile-first, insurance platform, enabling insurance to be accessible online by millions in the region. Today, it's the leading insurance platform in Southeast Asia. Today, we are expanding ways to help people in Asia and it includes spending, saving, investing, exchanging, travelling, and more. Our objective is to build tools that will help people get more from their money and at ease and self reliance, become an expert. We believe AI will help us achieve this in our generation. We are looking for the most talented and driven people we can find. We are looking for people who work for their passion, not counting hours. Who loves building great next-generation products, not status quo. Who cares about redefining how everyone around us can get the best financial applications, not for an exclusive few. We have teams working around the world, with over 20 nationalities and growing from our offices and remotely. Join us and build a better future. THE ROLE We are looking for a Lead Engineer to take technical ownership of complex products and systems and raise the engineering bar across the team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will be expected to design systems, write and review code, solve difficult engineering problems, guide other engineers and drive major initiatives from idea to production. You should be comfortable moving between architecture and implementation — making strong technical decisions while still being close enough to the code to execute when needed. WHAT YOU'LL OWN - Lead the technical design and execution of major products, features and engineering initiatives. - Design scalable, reliable and maintainable systems across backend, frontend, APIs, databases and infrastructure. - Stay hands-on with engineering through coding, prototyping, code reviews, debugging and production problem-solving. - Make architecture decisions and technical trade-offs that balance speed, scalability, reliability and maintainability. - Break ambiguous product and technical problems into clear engineering solutions and execution plans. - Set a high bar for code quality, system design, testing, security, observability and production reliability. - Review technical designs and code from other engineers and provide clear, actionable feedback. - Mentor engineers and help strengthen technical capability across the team. - Identify technical risks, bottlenecks and architectural weaknesses before they become larger problems. - Work closely with engineering, product, design and AI teams to ship high-quality products quickly. - Improve engineering tooling, development practices and automation to increase team velocity. - Own systems beyond release — monitor production, investigate incidents, resolve root causes and continuously improve reliability. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Strong software engineering background with significant experience building and shipping production systems. - Deep technical expertise in one or more areas such as backend, frontend, distributed systems, APIs, databases or cloud infrastructure. - Strong system design and architecture skills with experience making technical decisions for complex or high-scale systems. - Strong coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on. - Proven experience leading major engineering projects or providing technical leadership to other engineers. - Comfortable reviewing code, debugging complex issues and working directly with production systems. - Able to explain complex technical decisions clearly and influence engineers across teams. - Strong product sense and ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes. - Able to work fast with ambiguity and take ownership from problem definition through production. - Strong judgment around when to move quickly, when to simplify and when deeper engineering investment is required. THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR - Engineers who want a leadership title but no longer want to write or review code. - People who only want to work within one narrow technical area. - Engineers who wait for complete specifications before starting. - Candidates who over-engineer solutions when a simpler approach would achieve the outcome. - Engineers who focus only on implementation without understanding the product or business problem. - People who avoid production incidents, difficult debugging or ownership after release. - Candidates who make vague claims about technical leadership without being able to explain what they personally designed, built, shipped or scaled. THE BAR We are looking for technical leaders with real engineering career highlights. A strong highlight is not simply having a senior title or working at a famous technology company. A strong highlight means you personally designed, built, shipped or scaled a serious product, platform or system and can go deep into the technical decisions behind it. You should be able to demonstrate both technical depth and technical leadership — someone who can solve difficult engineering problems personally while making the engineers around them stronger. LOCATION This is a hybrid role. You are expected to work from our local office at least 3 days per week, with the remaining days offering flexibility to work remotely. Candidates should be based in, or able to work from, the location where the role is advertised. LANGUAGE English is our main working language across global teams. Strong English communication is required. INTERVIEW PROCESS Our process is designed to move fast: 1. Online assessment or practical task 2. Technical interview 3. CEO / final round For strong candidates, we aim to complete the process and make an offer within 1 week from the start of the interview process. Candidates who complete assessments quickly will be prioritized.