Lead Software Engineer, Holiday Experience

2 Days Old

Heidi was born to make it easy for more and more people to discover the power of the mountains. We burst onto the ski holiday market in 2018 (formally known as Ski Zoom) and have seen exponential growth. The company came from a desire to fix the lack of flexibility in the winter ski market. We help skiers and mountain lovers discover resorts that are hidden gems alongside the classics, and our clever tech is helping them to do it in a way that suits them best. We’re a youthful, challenger brand, with an awesome culture, and we’re shaking up a very traditional ski/mountain holiday industry. Looking to the future, we have huge ambitions for growth. In 2024 we grew by 64% and expect to grow even more in 2025. Having come 63rd in the Times top 100 fastest growing UK companies, and shortly after securing £5 million investment, we are in a prime position to achieve our goals. But key to that is also growing the Heidi team with even more brilliant people than we have now. So we are looking for someone who will be fundamental to the success of our vision and is excited to help us drive that forward. Holiday Experience Team We're hiring a Team Lead for our Holiday Experience team. This team owns the customer journey after booking: the post-booking experience, our travel companion app, customer communications (email, notifications), and the AI-powered customer service and automation tools that make those experiences great at scale. You’ll lead a small, focused team of engineers. You'll combine hands‑on technical contribution with people leadership: setting technical direction, shipping features, running the team's delivery, and helping your engineers grow. You'll work closely with a Product Manager who owns the "what"; you own the "how" and the "how well". Our tech stack is ASP.NET Core on the backend, React/NextJS and Tailwind on the frontend, with a mix of serverless and cloud-hosted architecture. This is a remote‑friendly role, with occasional visits to our Bristol office for team time. What you'll own
The technical direction of the Holiday Experience domain: architecture decisions, build‑vs‑buy trade‑offs, and long‑term system health. Your team's delivery: helping the team ship high‑quality work at a sustainable pace, balancing feature development with technical improvement. People development: regular 1:1s, performance conversations, coaching, and creating an environment where engineers do their best work. The reliability and performance of the systems your team builds: post‑booking flows, the travel companion app, customer communications, and AI‑powered customer service and automation tools.
What you'll bring
You've led a small team before, or you're a senior engineer who's ready to step into leadership. You're comfortable with 1:1s, giving feedback, and helping people navigate their careers. Experience with relational databases (MySQL, SQL Server) and an understanding of how to design and optimise for performance. You think about systems holistically: you care about reliability, observability, and maintainability, not just features. You're driven by delivering business value, not technical perfection. You favour simplicity, ship early, and learn from what happens next. Getting something useful in front of customers quickly matters more to you than getting it theoretically right the first time. You can work across the business: you're comfortable translating between technical and non‑technical contexts, and you can represent engineering's perspective in product and commercial conversations. You're excited about using AI to build smarter customer service and automation experiences. This team is at the frontier of how we use AI to improve the holiday experience, and you want to be part of shaping that.
How big is the team? Product: 1x Head of product 1x Senior product manager 1x Product manager 1x Design lead 1x Senior product designer Who's going to be your manager? You’ll be reporting to Nico, CTO. The interview process
TA Screening call (45 minutes) Technical screening call (45 minutes): a conversation about your experience, how you communicate, and whether there's a mutual fit. Technical interviews: a coding interview (around 1 to 1.5 hours) and a system design interview (45 minutes). You'll work through real‑world problems similar to what we encounter in our business. No trick questions; we want to see how you think and communicate. Founder/culture interview (45 minutes): meet one of our co‑founders. Experience and competency questions based on your background, and a chance for both sides to explore cultural fit.
Our employee benefits
Salary of circa £90- £100K based on experience 25 days annual leave + bank holidays + 4 “me/wellbeing” days We have a hybrid working policy and are happy for people to balance their working week between the office and home. Vitality health insurance. Enhanced parental leave for primary /secondary carers and adoptive parents.
Additional employee perks
A fun packed company social calendar including our summer party, end‑of‑term conference and budget for team celebrations £300 work from home budget
Our Commitment to inclusive hiring We want to create an inclusive environment that celebrates the diversity of our people whilst enabling them to do the best work of their careers. We are committed to ensuring that all our people processes are equitable. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, sex, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status. #J-18808-Ljbffr
Location:
Bristol
Job Type:
FullTime

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