Senior Tech Lead

About Lyst

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world's leading brands and stores. In 2025, Lyst joined Zozo, operators of Zozotown, the leading fashion e-commerce platform in Japan. This partnership marks a bold new era for Lyst, as we accelerate our vision and work together to transform the future of fashion shopping through AI and technology. 

At Lyst, we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn't, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better choices and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper.

The Role 

Lyst is looking for an experienced Tech Lead to join a Product Development tribe. We are building a fashion e-commerce platform that our users love, that brands are excited to partner with, and that we, as engineers, are proud to work on.

The technical leadership of a squad entails optimising delivery cadences, resolving cross-squad issues, and ensuring effective communication throughout the product lifecycle while ensuring sustainably-built and operational services. This involves closely collaborating with the product lead, prioritising roadmaps, and engaging in effective interactions with stakeholders. Additionally, it involves fostering a nurturing environment that combines a focus on people’s growth, delivery, and innovation.

As a tech lead, you have key accountabilities. Your job is to make sure it happens and leverage your team to do so.

Key accountabilities include:

• Unblocking cross-squad issues.
• Responsible for communication of any issues/concerns/delays especially during the build phase of the product lifecycle in a timely manner.
• Effective resourcing (or escalation of resourcing issues) to suit the business needs.

• Working on a joint prioritisation across product and technical roadmaps.
• Feed in and adjustment of product solutions, balancing out feasibility, scope and technical quality.

• Responsible for communication of incidents to relevant stakeholders in a timely manner.
• Gathering / identifying missing needs / requirements.

• Ensure the team’s development practices, environment and lifecycle adequately supports the technical and business needs.
• Maintain adequate test automation.
• Suitable deployment and release approaches/tooling.
• Ensures we avoid and remove knowledge silos.

• Encourages coaching between peers.
• Finds and leverages opportunities for team members growth in context of the squad’s work.

• Create an environment fostering innovation (for improving the tech stack or to solve the business problem)

• Ensure a solid monitoring and alerting for squad owned services.
• Maintain runbooks for incidents and general documentation of services in good shape.
• Delivering sustainable software by covering technical debt, operability, documentation.

• Understand and monitor infrastructure and services cost.

• Maintaining a 6-month technical strategy collaborated, communicated & understood by the squad lead and the team.
• Owning a 3 sprint technical roadmap with demonstrable progress

• prioritised with the squad lead.
• Ensuring consistency and compliance of the squad’s outputs & dependencies in relation to the technical strategy and best practices (API contracts in line with the guidance, BFF adherence, Data owned by the Squad adheres to a compliant strategy)

Within the first three months, you will be able to:

• Contribute to every part of our system, tests, documentation, as well as code and process.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, analytics, QA and designers.
• Ensure the stability of our system by improving the monitoring tools we use.
• Write resilient code that is well tested (unit, integration, etc.) and quality controlled.
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews and pair programming
• Be curious —not just the code, but the architecture of our platforms and everything that makes them work as well as the product itself.
• Participate and organise all team ceremonies and have direct input in the team's ways of working and (sometimes with donuts).
• Work inside Product Development tribe towards the success of the Lyst Marketplace, collaborating with key teams from Discovery, CRM or Paid Marketing.
• Participate in and help drive the Front-end chapter and champion best practices across the company.
• Gain expertise over our tools and services: React, Typescript, Python, Docker, Github Actions, PostgreSQL, AWS, etc...

About the teams

• We build seamless and trustworthy shopping experiences, ensuring customers feel confident and supported.
• We are dedicated to helping our customers find the products they love in our massive (largest in the industry) product catalogue.

• We are a multidisciplinary team which spans the full stack as well as web + mobile app development.
• We are a Python shop, and build our stack through a Backend for Front-end approach building a common front-end for our Web, iOS and Android clients.
• We are passionate about testing, unit tests and end to end tests with a preference towards BDD.
• We document and are accountable for the system's stability - No blame game.
• We scale, improve and maintain our integrated checkout system for processing customer orders.
• We strive to understand business requirements to improve monitoring.
• We are fully AWS hosted and use a range of tools and setups: ECS, Docker, GitHub, GHA, Postgresql, Redis, SQS, and SNS.

Requirements

• You have experience with efficient processes, and can help us leverage them to make delivery painless.
• Proven experience with web fundamentals and designing systems.
• Communication: You can communicate clearly and be humble when sharing ideas with everyone on the team. You can explain your ideas clearly and transform them into plans. You can design the solution to a complex problem.
• Quality - You strive to write code that is readable by everyone, well tested and robust in production. Code without rigorous tests helps no one.
• You aren’t afraid to refactor existing code in favour of working around shortcomings.
• Experience delivering and optimising front-end features for a high-traffic website.
• A thorough knowledge of automated testing, particularly unit testing (ideally using React Testing Library).
• Design and implement APIs and backend services using Python (Django) that serves all front end including web + app.
• Build and evolve high-performance web applications with React, TypeScript and StoryBook
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines i.e. GitHub Actions.

Benefits

• Our Ways of Working: We all come into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays , with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.
• Time Off: In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
• Competitive Family Leave Package: This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.
• Clothing Benefit: We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service.
• Private Healthcare: Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start.
• Training Allowance: We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.
• Pension Scheme: Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.
• Eye Tests and Vouchers: Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.
• Cycle-to-Work Scheme: Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them.
• Transport Season Ticket Loan: Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.
• Social Events: Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.

We want to build a world where fashion works for everyone, and we want teams that are just as inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture at Lyst. We recognise and celebrate the value and impact diversity brings to our company and are committed to ensuring this is a consistent focus, for which we are held to account. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this role. We are happy to talk about flexible working arrangements.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Lyst we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.