Technical Lead (Full Stack)

Technical Lead (Full Stack)

*London (hybrid, two days per week at Somerset House); £55,000 to £65,000 depending on experience, plus potential for equity participation; Visa sponsorship available
*

About GoodPeople:

We are GoodPeople, a fast-growing tech for good startup and social enterprise. We connect purposeful employers and their jobs to local communities, creating social and climate impact in the process. By combining a jobs matching platform with human-centred delivery, we help communities access good work in growth sectors. Our flagship programme, the Net Zero Careers Accelerator, is the most advanced of its kind in the UK, aimed at addressing the significant and growing skills shortage in the green economy.

The role:

You will own and take overall responsibility for our proprietary job matching technology stack: build it, run it and be proud of it. You will be our lead in-house engineer, working directly with the Chief Operating Officer and supported by an established external development team, with budget for AI tooling and the expectation that you use it well.

We have a live stack: two job platforms (Strapi, Next.js, React, Postgres) serving jobseekers and employers across London and the green economy; a job ingestion pipeline that collects, classifies and publishes listings using LLM-based enrichment; agentic AI services built with LangGraph; and FastAPI analytics services powering dashboards for property developers, contractors and public sector commissioners.

This is a hands-on role with real ownership. You will own the technical decisions, with the COO and our external development team behind you. You will decide how things are built, ship them, and answer for them. If you want to point at a platform creating measurable social impact and say I built that, this is the role for you.

What you will do:

• Platform development. Build and maintain features across our two job platforms in JavaScript/TypeScript: Next.js and React frontends, Strapi v4 backends, Postgres. This is the core of the role.

• Data pipelines. Own the job ingestion pipeline end to end: source collection, quality gates, LLM classification and enrichment, deduplication, expiry checking and publication. A redesign is scoped and ready to build.

• AI services. Maintain and extend our agentic AI systems (LangGraph, FastAPI, Pydantic), including a candidate-matching email agent. Python maintainer-level work with room to grow.

• Architecture. Make and document the technical decisions: schema changes, service consolidation, system design across multi-container services such as Redis and Celery. You inherit thorough architecture documentation.

• External team. Work alongside our external development team. You set the standard, review the output and decide what is built in-house versus outside.

• Delivery. Manage competing priorities across programmes, commercial commitments and platform health. Small team, quick decisions, visible results.

What we are looking for:

You will need:

• Strong JavaScript/TypeScript full stack experience: Node.js, Next.js, React, and relational databases (Postgres ideally). Experience with Strapi or another headless CMS is a plus.

• Working Python: confident maintaining and extending FastAPI services, comfortable with Pydantic and SQLAlchemy or able to pick them up quickly.

• Shipped AI: you have put an LLM-powered feature into production and dealt with the challenges. You know what evaluation means in practice.

• AI-first ways of working: you use AI tools heavily and skilfully in your own development work, and you can show the judgement that separates using them well from trusting them blindly.

• Evidence of ownership: you have built something substantial from scratch, or been the person a system depended on, and you are proud of it. We care more about this than about years of experience.

• Attention to detail: you notice details and also know how to design processes to catch issues.
  Commercial work experience: you have worked in a professional team and managed competing priorities. This is not a first job.

• Great teamwork and communication skills: you work just as well in a team as alone, and enjoy working together to create something great. You're great at communicating to different audiences.

Nice to have:

• Exposure to LangGraph or familiarity with OpenAI & Anthropic API/SDK, and to Langfuse/Langsmith or similar evaluation tooling.

• Experience with jobs platforms, search, SEO.

• Experience designing and operating multi-container services, including technologies such as Redis and Celery.

• Experience with Upsun/Platform.sh, GCP, or other cloud infrastructure and services.

• An interest in our mission: social impact, green skills, or widening access to good work.

What we offer:

• Salary. £55,000 to £65,000 starting salary depending on experience. There will be an opportunity to discuss equity participation once in role.

• Sponsorship. We hold a sponsor licence and welcome applications from candidates who need Skilled Worker sponsorship, including those currently in the UK on Graduate, Skilled Worker or dependant visas. Sponsorship is subject to Home Office salary and eligibility requirements.

• Where you work. Hybrid: two days per week together at Somerset House, central London; the rest is flexible.

• Holiday and health. 25 days plus bank holidays; healthcare scheme following probation; stakeholder pension.

• The work itself. Real ownership from day one, a documented estate, an external team behind you, and tools and budget to support how modern engineers work.

How we hire:

Four steps (we are moving quickly):

• Application: CV plus a short summary on the thing you have built that you are proudest of, and why.

• Screening call: 30 minutes with our COO on experience, motivation and practicalities.

• Technical assessment: A time-boxed take home task. AI tools are allowed and encouraged; we assess how well you use them, not whether you avoid them.

• Review interview: walk us through your submission, Q&A.

If you need any adjustments to take part in our process, tell us and we will make them.
GoodPeople is an equal opportunity employer. We actively welcome applicants from the communities we serve.