Software Engineering Lead

Job description

Do you enjoy building scalable products that empower compliance teams to track fund flows and uncover deeper insights in financial data? Are you excited to solve complex engineering challenges that improve speed, precision, and usability across investigative workflows? Elliptic is seeking a Software Engineering Lead to join our Investigations team https://www.elliptic.co/solutions/investigations. This is a unique opportunity to make a tangible impact at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and financial crime prevention. You’ll lead a team of talented product and data engineers dedicated to building powerful tools that help investigators worldwide uncover and stop illicit activity in the crypto space. The impact you will have: As Lead of the Investigations team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of crypto investigations and how compliance teams track and prevent financial crime. Working closely with the product team, you’ll help define the technical direction of our product that’s quickly becoming the industry standard. You will work with product and data engineers to turn complex data into simple, useful product features and lead the development of new improvements across the platform. In this role, you will also coach and mentor a high-performing team, foster innovation, and partner with cross-functional teams to ensure we deliver meaningful value to our users and set the benchmark for excellence in crypto investigations. What you will do: - Write and review code to unblock the team, or demonstrate best practices, and pair with team members to share knowledge and tackle challenging technical issues. - Help your team make sound technical decisions by considering trade-offs and choosing approaches that align with both technical excellence and business objectives. - Work closely with the Product team and other stakeholders to ensure the team works on meaningful missions. - Help team members find their own solutions, building problem-solving skills and creating a self-sufficient, resilient team. - Provide system overviews and context to new team members, accelerating their integration and productivity. - Attend regular Lead meetings to share updates and exchange best practices. - Explain complex technical concepts to engineers, managers, and business stakeholders to ensure quality delivery and collaboration. - Set the standard for how the team uses AI coding tools, knowing when they speed up delivery and when they need extra scrutiny, and make sure engineers can explain and own any AI-assisted code before it ships. You will be a great fit here if you: - Balance technical quality with business needs, knowing when to aim for perfection and when good enough helps the team move and learn faster. - Care about writing clean, reliable code and enjoy working across backend, frontend, and data systems to build great products. - Explain technical ideas clearly so everyone from engineers to product managers stays aligned and informed. - Help team members grow by coaching, encouraging confidence and ownership in their work. - Focus on what really matters by delivering meaningful results that serve both users and the business. - Foster a supportive, open, and collaborative team culture where everyone can do their best work. - Actively use AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude etc) as part of your daily workflow, can critically evaluate AI-generated code, and understand when AI tools are useful and when they’re not. Our ideal candidate has: - Demonstrated success leading and mentoring a team of 3–5 software engineers for at least 2 years. - Strong experience with TypeScript across backend (Node.js/NestJS) and frontend (React/Redux) development. - Proven track record of architecting scalable UI applications and APIs with ability to make informed decisions about technology choices and architectural patterns. - Experienced in leading technical initiatives, fostering collaboration, driving delivery, and maintaining high engineering standards. - Good understanding of data visualisation and experience with libraries or tools for rendering complex network graphs and transaction flows. - Prior exposure with databases and writing SQL queries, and comfortable partnering with data and application engineers. Bonus Points for: - Good understanding of cloud technologies such as AWS Serverless, API gateway, Kubernetes, and Terraform, with the ability to guide teams on infrastructure best practices. - Experience with monitoring tools like DataDog and general observability best practices. - Interest or experience in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. JOB BENEFITS How We Work - Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year - £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space Learning & Development - $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development Vacation/Leave - Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays - An extra day for your birthday - Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave Benefits - Private Health Insurance - we use Vitality! - Full access to Spill Mental Health Support - Life Assurance: 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries - Cycle to Work Scheme We know Diversity and Inclusion is much deeper than just hiring, but it’s important for us to mention it here. We welcome and embrace individuals of all backgrounds and identities at Elliptic, and this is an ongoing priority for us. We know incredible people don’t all think in the same way. We want to be challenged every day. We believe our diverse team of individuals underpins this by bringing creative thinking and innovation to Elliptic every day. We are committed to creating a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace, so we welcome applications from everyone, even if you may not think you fit all of the requirements of our roles. We foster an environment of psychological safety, where everyone feels comfortable to bring their whole self to work