Appnovation Technologies - Technical Lead

• Technical direction and quality • Set the team's technical direction and own architecture and design decisions across the composable stack. • Select and justify the right headless CMS, front-end framework and hosting approach for each property, weighing editorial experience, performance, cost and lock-in. • Design content models and component libraries that scale across multiple brands, sites, regions and locales. • Uphold coding standards and best practices through consistent code review. • Ensure developers test their own work before it reaches QA, with automated testing and CI/CD in place. • Hold the team to clear standards for security, accessibility, search and performance (detailed below). • Web standards: accessibility, search and performance • Own accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA as a minimum, with awareness of the European Accessibility Act and UK public-sector regulations where they apply. Build it into components, content models and testing, combining automated tools (axe, Lighthouse) with manual keyboard and screen-reader checks. • Own technical SEO: semantic HTML, structured data (schema.org), metadata, canonicals, sitemaps, hreflang for multi-region sites, and redirect strategy during migrations. • Prepare properties for answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO), so content is structured, attributable and easy for AI search and assistants to find, understand and cite. • Set performance budgets and hold the team to Core Web Vitals targets (LCP, INP, CLS), using real-user monitoring as well as lab testing. • Build these checks into CI so regressions are caught before release, not after. • AI-assisted engineering • Lead a team working in a heavily AI-tooled environment, using coding assistants and agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or Cursor, and set clear rules for how they are used. • Preserve codebase quality: AI-generated code meets the same standards for review, testing, security and maintainability as hand-written code. • Keep people accountable: every change has an owner who understands it, and architecture decisions are not delegated to tools. • Maintain the guardrails that make AI output reliable, including linting, type checking, test coverage, documented conventions and context files the tools can follow. • Watch for AI-specific risks, such as client data or secrets in prompts, licence and IP concerns, and duplicated or inconsistent code. • Migrations and integrations • Plan and lead content and platform migrations from legacy or monolithic CMS platforms to headless, including content audits, mapping, transformation and URL redirect strategy. • Design repeatable migration and automation pipelines using n8n or similar tools, alongside custom Node scripts where needed. • Lead integration development between the CMS and the client's wider estate, such as CRM, DAM, PIM, search, analytics, marketing automation and identity. • Own API design, webhooks and event-driven patterns, with clear error handling, monitoring and rollback. • Documentation and knowledge sharing • Own documentation for architecture, content models, integrations, design decisions and technical specifications. • Turn one-to-one guidance into reusable material so onboarding and handoff don't depend on any one person. • Stay current on [client-specific compliance requirements, e.g. UK GDPR, cookie consent (PECR) and accessibility obligations]. • Team leadership and mentoring • Break plans down into well-formed tasks and stories the team can act on. • Delegate work fairly and evenly across the team. • Coach and mentor developers to grow the team's capability in headless and composable delivery. • Client communication and stakeholder management • Serve as the client's primary contact for technical discussions. • Explain technical concepts, options and status to non-technical stakeholders, including marketing and content teams, in plain language. • Manage client expectations honestly on scope, effort and risk. • Delivery • Delivery • Lead technical input to planning, estimation and backlog refinement. • Track progress against milestones and budget with the project manager. • Identify technical risks early, particularly around migration cut-over and third-party integrations, and escalate critical issues before they become surprises. • Commercial awareness • Seek client feedback and fold it into development cycles. • Spot genuine opportunities to add value for the client, and bring them to the account team. • What success looks like • Delegation is healthy. Work is spread across the team, not bottlenecked on you. • Delegation is healthy. • Documentation survives handoff. A new engineer can onboard and maintain the system from what is written down. • Documentation survives handoff. • Migrations land cleanly. Content moves with no lost pages, broken links or SEO drop, and cut-overs happen on the planned date. • Migrations land cleanly. • Standards are measurable. Properties meet WCAG 2.2 AA and Core Web Vitals targets, and are visible in both traditional and AI-driven search. • Standards are measurable. • Quality holds as speed rises. AI tooling increases throughput without increasing defects, accessibility issues or performance regressions. • Quality holds as speed rises. • Editors are self-sufficient. Content teams can build and publish pages without developer help. • Editors are self-sufficient. • Integrations are reliable. Data flows between systems are monitored, and failures are caught before the client notices. • Integrations are reliable. • The client trusts you. Stakeholders route technical decisions through you. • The client trusts you.