Oak Furnitureland is a beloved British furniture retailer with a passion for helping people create their dream homes. We are committed to exceptional quality and stylish furniture at accessible prices. As we continue to grow and evolve, we are building an AI-native engineering team to modernise the large, established platform behind our ecommerce site and internal systems, and we are seeking a talented Lead Engineer to join our Acorn Internal Tools squad.
The Lead Engineer leads a squad of eight engineers, owning its technical direction and delivery, and sets how the squad builds software with AI agents safely and at pace. The Acorn Internal Tools squad owns Acorn, our in-house ERP, which runs orders, stock, warehouse, delivery routes, reporting, commissions and scheduled jobs. The squad keeps the business running day to day and is modernising Acorn's admin front end. You will line-manage and grow the squad's Senior and Software Engineers, and work closely with product, the Delivery Assurance Manager, the Test Architect and the other two Lead Engineers.
We are looking to work AI-first. AI agents write much of our code, tests and documentation, and our people remain accountable for intent, correctness, security and outcomes. Work starts from a written spec, changes stay small and reviewable, every AI-generated change is understood by a named person before it merges, and a deterministic test suite guards every release. We are currently in a transition from non-AI, manually tested workflows to a more automated one.
This is a hybrid role with 2 days in our Swindon head office (Tuesday and Thursday) and 3 days from home.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
Leadership
- Line-manage, coach and grow the squad's Senior and Software Engineers, including their skill with AI tooling, with a development plan for each person.
- Promote collaboration and engagement, empowering people through technical ownership and clear roles, and reducing key person risk by removing knowledge silos.
- Track squad health and delivery metrics (throughput, change failure rate, rework) and act on what they show.
- Work with the Delivery Assurance Manager and product owners on scope, sequencing and trade-offs.
- Lead recruitment, interviewing, induction and onboarding for the squad.
- Manage holiday, absence and timesheets for your direct reports.
- Contribute to cross-squad engineering standards with the other Lead Engineers.
Technical Direction
- Own the squad's architecture, technical roadmap and key design decisions, recorded as architecture decision records the team and its agents can use.
- Set the direction for Acorn's architecture and the modernisation of its admin front end, keeping orders, stock and warehouse operations running without interruption.
- Plan and sequence major upgrades across the squad's area (PHP version, ORM, test framework) as part of a dated modernisation roadmap.
- Agree and document ownership of shared code, such as the framework core, domain layer and checkout, with the other squads.
- Guide architecture and integration design across our many third-party services, including payments, consumer finance, couriers and warehouse systems.
AI-native Delivery
- Define and run the squad's AI-native workflow: spec-first delivery, agent context files (AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md), review rules and human checkpoints.
- Decide where agents can work with light review and where changes need deep human scrutiny, such as security, personal data, payments and core domain logic.
- Build agent-friendly foundations: fast automated pull request checks, agent task guides, and code broken into pieces small enough for agents and reviewers to handle.
- Keep engineering foundations strong: small batches, short-lived branches, CI/CD, observability and fast rollback.
Quality and testing
- Review the squad's highest-risk changes and hold the bar for code and test quality, whether written by people or agents.
- Work with the Test Architect on the squad's test strategy and quality gates.
- Make sure automated testing is part of the squad's Definition of Done, with AI-generated tests always reviewed by a person.
SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
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Substantial commercial software engineering experience, including technical leadership of a delivery team
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Proven leadership of a large, established PHP application through incremental modernisation
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Strong PHP 8, MySQL (including complex reporting SQL) and Doctrine ORM
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Experience with jQuery and Vue admin interfaces, background jobs, cron and third-party API integration
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Existing experience of, or real eagerness to learn, React, Next.js and TypeScript as we move our stack
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Strong system design, with sound judgement on security, performance and maintainability
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Daily, hands-on use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code on production code, and experience setting team practices for AI-assisted development
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Strong CI/CD, testing and DevOps practice
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Clear written communication and proven people leadership, including coaching, feedback and hiring
- Desirable: ERP, logistics or warehouse experience, AWS (SQS/SNS, infrastructure as code) and experience building with LLM APIs or agent frameworks
BENEFITS
- Employee discount: amazing discounts available on all Oak Furnitureland products after successful completion of probation
- 25 days holiday per year plus bank holidays
- Birthday: an additional day off for you to celebrate your birthday
- Pension: 4% employee contribution matched by the company
- Group Income Protection (GIP) - Cover in the event that you are unable to work due to an accident or long-term illness
- Group Life Insurance (GDIS) - The Company provides Life Insurance cover of three times your basic salary
- Employee Assistance Programme: gives all employees access to both telephone and face-to-face counselling services
- My Rewards Programme: offers discounts on everything from restaurants and supermarkets, to entertainment and holidays
- Free onsite parking