Engineering Lead - PHP

Role overview:

Engineering Lead - PHP
Waterloo - Hybrid Working
Full Time
Permanent
Grade 5

At Currys we’re united by one passion: to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. As the UK’s best-known retailer of tech, we’re proud of the service our customers receive – and it’s all down to our team of 25,000 caring and committed colleagues. Working as one team, we learn and grow together, celebrating the big and small moments that make every day amazing.

We are looking for a technically experienced Engineering Lead to join our Engineering function and take ownership of engineering quality, standards and delivery across our web application landscape - the technology that powers Currys Online and Mobile. The current estate is primarily PHP, and this role requires credible technical depth in that environment.

This is a hands-on leadership role. The Engineering Lead will be equally comfortable presenting technical risk to senior stakeholders and conducting code reviews with delivery teams. The split is intentional - we need someone who leads by doing, not just directing.

Our PHP estate is business-critical, high-volume and customer-facing. The immediate priority is stability, quality and incremental enhancement - but this role is also about raising the engineering bar and building the internal capability to carry the platform forward. You will govern external delivery partners, set and enforce standards, and begin growing a small in-house engineering team.

This role will suit a senior PHP engineer who has operated at lead level in a complex, multi-partner environment and who knows from experience what production-grade engineering looks like. Someone who designs for failure, builds in observability from day one, treats CI/CD as a discipline, and can apply pragmatic MVP thinking to get value out of the door without compromising quality.

Role overview:

The Engineering Lead's core accountabilities span five areas:

1. Engineering Standards & Code Quality

• Own and enforce engineering standards across all delivery partners and internal teams - covering code quality, patterns, security, and maintainability.
• Conduct and lead code reviews across the PHP estate.
• Define and document engineering principles for the Online & Mobile portfolio, ensuring they are understood and applied consistently across all teams and partners.

2. Platform Stability, Enhancement & Technical Assurance

• Take technical ownership of the PHP application landscape.
• Identify and address technical debt in a structured, prioritised way.
• Ensure that resilience, self-healing and scalability are designed into all changes from the start.

3. CI/CD, Pipelines & Release Governance

• Own the engineering approach to CI/CD - whether stabilising and improving an existing setup or introducing new pipeline standards.
• Define and implement pipeline standards, branching strategy, and environment management across the function.
• Conduct technical audits across delivery partners.

4. Partner Governance & Internal Capability Building

• Work closely with external delivery partners to set clear engineering expectations, assure their output, and manage performance against agreed standards - supplier management is a key part of this role.
• Recruit, nurture and develop a small internal Engineering team - building in-house capability that reduces partner dependency over time.
• Challenge where quality or approach falls short; escalate clearly and quickly when issues put delivery at risk.

5. Stakeholder Engagement & Requirements Translation

• Represent engineering at programme and senior stakeholder level - translating technical complexity into clear, actionable language.
• Apply pragmatic, MVP thinking to delivery.
• Work closely with Solution Architecture, ADMs, Technical Business Analysis and Quality to ensure engineering is set up to deliver.
  
  

Required Skills & Experience:

• 5+ years of senior engineering experience, including time operating at Engineering Lead level in a multi-team or multi-partner environment.
• Proven experience governing and assuring large-scale, full stack web applications - the current estate is primarily PHP
• Hands-on, full stack capability - strong backend depth with proven frontend experience (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and modern frameworks).
• Experience stabilising, enhancing and maintaining large-scale, customer-facing web applications
• Demonstrable experience building resilient, scalable, production-grade applications.
• Monitoring and alerting built in from the start, not added later - candidates must be able to articulate their approach to observability as part of design, not an afterthought.
• Strong SDLC knowledge: CI/CD implementation and improvement, pipeline ownership, branching strategy, environment management and release governance.
• Demonstrable ability to work with and hold external delivery partners to account - setting standards, assuring output, managing performance.

Strongly preferred:

• Experience in retail, ecommerce or a high-volume consumer-facing environment.
• Direct PHP experience at senior or lead level - candidates coming from equivalent backend environments must demonstrate a clear ability to govern and assure PHP delivery in practice.
• .Net experience is a strong advantage - the broader Currys engineering landscape includes .Net services and cross-stack familiarity will be valuable in this role.
• Azure Cloud

Why join us:

Join our team and we'll be with you every step of the way, helping you develop the career you want with new opportunities, on-going training and skills for life.

Not only can you shape your own future, but you can help take charge of ours too. As the biggest recycler and repairer of tech in the UK, we’re in a position to make a real impact on people and the planet.

Every voice has a space at our table and we're committed to making inclusion and diversity part of everything we do, including how we strengthen our workforce. We want to make sure you have a fair opportunity to show us your talents during our application process, so if you need any additional assistance with your application please email [email protected] and we'll do our best to help.