Engineering Team Lead

Engineering Team Lead

• Location: Bristol, Hybrid
• Salary: £90,000 - £95,000 + Share Options
• Reporting to: VP of Technology

About Us

Duel is a SaaS company on a mission to make Brand Advocacy the industry standard philosophy for building brilliant retail brands. It was founded by world record-breaking adventurer and former brand ambassador Paul Archer. We exist to show that companies built for advocacy can change the world. In today's hyper connected world in which social media is now twice the size of all other media channels combined and entirely user-generated, the most successful brands are the ones investing in people and in community, not in ads.

The Duel Brand Advocacy Solution allows enterprise brands to do just that. We have onboarded over 60 influential brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Charlotte Tilbury, Spanx, Victoria’s Secret, LUSH and Elemis. The Duel team's global presence includes offices in New York City & London. Our team of 60+ is composed of psychologists, brand experts and community builders, combining cutting-edge brand expertise with seasoned SaaS experience.

Backed by top European VCs, Duel recently announced a $16 million Series A, which will accelerate growth in the US from our base in New York, and bring our entirely AI-driven product vision to life to equip brands with the solution needed to drive growth through thousands of advocates, customers, creators and brand ambassadors.

The Role

We’re looking for an Engineering Team Lead to guide one of our advocate engineering pillars. You’ll be responsible for leading a brilliant team of engineers building customer-facing features that power the workflows of thousands of advocates. The Advocate pillar is responsible for the end‑to‑end advocate experience: how advocates join, complete tasks, tier up, and engage with brands. It owns the Advocate Portal, including gamification to encourage customer engagement.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll split your time between writing production code, mentoring engineers, and driving the technical execution of product initiatives in partnership with Design, Product, and Data. You’ll also be working closely with our AI Teams to embed AI into our product surface area.

You’ll energise teams, multiply engineering impact, and communicate with clarity. You’ll bring agility and speed to execution, while applying AI pragmatically, leveraging it where it delivers immediate value and exercising patience where it requires time to mature.

We’re looking for someone who will…

• Lead a cross-functional team of engineers to deliver features across the stack using Angular & Typescript on the front-end, a Node.js service layer, and MongoDB as the data store.
• Shape the advocate pillar’s technical stack to move quickly, aligning on primary frameworks and deployment norms (AWS ECS, Elastic).
• Own Advocate pillar outcomes; ship, experiment and partner with Product to scope work, shape roadmap priorities, and ensure on-time delivery.
• Own the technical quality, stability, and scalability of the systems your team maintains.
• Guide architecture decisions across backend services, API design, and frontend experience.
• Drive team rituals (standups, sprint planning, retros) and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
• Coach and mentor engineers on your team, helping them grow technically and professionally.
• Collaborate with peers across engineering, product, brand experience and AI & Data to evolve shared patterns of improvement, deployment pipelines, and increased operational excellence.
• Own the health and productivity of the engineers in your team, fostering a culture of iterative collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with other engineering leads and teams across Wise to ensure your team’s work is aligned with the wider technical strategy.
• Own the hiring, growth and development of your team, double the team size and its impact.

We’d love to hear from you, if you have…

• 6-8 years of experience in software engineering with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or mentoring capacity
• Strong expertise in JavaScript/Typescript, Node.js and front-end web technologies
• Experience designing and implementing scalable features in revenue-critical systems
• Proven ability to lead by influence and collaborate effectively with engineers and non-engineering teams alike
• Solid understanding of software engineering best practices including version control, CI/CD, testing, and documentation
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to give and receive constructive feedback
• Experience working in Agile development environments
• Senior‑engineer‑level design & architecture; can contribute hands‑on (reviews, designs, prototypes).
• You have experience working with and building distributed, high scalability systems and monolith architectures
• Designing, testing, and deploying AI-powered tools (agents, copilots, workflow automations) that improve efficiency and quality.
• You're a great communicator who can articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment and have experience working effectively with cross-functional peers like product managers,designers and data engineers.
• Ability to operate within the gray and find the solution when faced with ambiguity.
• B2C Applications; Social, UGC, advocacy, customer experience or gamification
• Plus plus, if you’re familiar with integrations‑heavy SaaS platforms
• Frontend: Angular, TypeScript.
• Backend: Node.js / TypeScript.
• Data/Infrastructure: MongoDB, Elastic, Snowflake; AWS/ECS; Cloudflare; Heroku.
• Source/Tools: GitHub; Cursor.
• Experimentation: LaunchDarkly.

Nice‑To‑Haves

Tech Stack

• Security & Compliance: ISO27001 certified; plans for SOC2 and ISO42001. EU data residency.
• Key Integrations: Klaviyo (CRM), Hookdeck, major social platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook), TikAPI, BrightData, Apify.

The Dueligan Culture

• We want to build a remarkable company with remarkable people and a remarkable culture that you will want to shout from the rooftops about. Advocacy is our north star, both for our customers and our employees.
• A High Trust, Tight Ship, full of Utterly Lovely & Bloody Brilliant People doing their Best Work Together
• We value trust and freedom above all else. Yet this must be combined with deep ownership, execution, and clear, candid communication. If this is not how you are at Duel, or you break that trust, you will not be around for long.
• Dueligans combined are the largest shareholders in Duel. We take that concept of ownership seriously.

In-person and remote working balance…

We do much of our best work as a team together in the office, which is why we are only hiring people within a commutable distance of our London or New York offices. However, we also know that we do our best work alone at home, and we all need to be able to balance work with life, childcare commitments, and other responsibilities. The office philosophy is hybrid, where you're encouraged to be in the office a few days a week, namely when your team will be there.

• However, the name of the game with everything we do is freedom and flexibility. So you do, as long as it's not at the expense of others.
• Duel Perks and Package

We have a growing benefits package, including;

• Flexible working hours - if you need to fit around childcare or need to work around your life, we understand.
• Around 32 days of Annual Leave (28 excluding bank holidays and an extended break between Christmas and New Year, when we close the office). On-going training where required.
• Options scheme for all full-time employees - it’s important to us that everybody owns a part of the company and shares in the benefits of what we build.
• Company MacBook to work from

• £350 Wfh Set-Up

• Headspace Contributions

• Personal Development budget and support
• 2 additional days leave for volunteering