Job Description

We have an exciting new opportunity for a Software Engineering Chapter Lead to lead and nurture a cross-tribe software engineering chapter comprising engineers at all levels, including Principal Software Engineers who are typically responsible for architectural design and leadership across the eCommerce domain.



This role is central to shaping and maintaining architectural coherence, fostering collaboration, and enabling high-quality software design across web, mobile, backend services, integration, and infrastructure layers.



Working closely with Product, QE, Platform, and Support teams, the Chapter Lead builds a strong and inclusive community of practice, champions modern architectural approaches, and drives adoption of patterns and tools that support scalability, resilience, and delivery velocity.

The Chapter Lead also plays a critical role in reducing architectural duplication, encouraging reuse of platform components, enabling self-service tooling, and ensuring solutions are secure, observable, operable -- and aligned with non-production and lifecycle concerns. The role includes scope for hands-on prototyping and modelling, enabling technical leadership by example.



This is a permanent role, based in Luton! (Hybrid Working)

What you'll be doing

Define and articulate the architectural vision and roadmap for eCommerce technology, ensuring alignment with business objectives and enterprise architecture standards.
Build and lead a community of practice for technical architecture and software

engineering across all eCommerce missions (e.g. channels, booking, payments, loyalty).
Provide line management and technical mentorship primarily to Principal Software Engineers, while supporting broader engineering career growth through coaching and community participation.
Foster collaboration across teams by encouraging knowledge sharing, reusable tooling, and implementation of best practices -- focusing on tools and techniques rather than documentation alone.
Develop and promote reusable architectural patterns and templates, often based on proven, working solutions from within squads.
Facilitate architectural discussions and reviews (e.g. through regular forums), improving visibility and cross-team alignment, and encouraging participation from all engineers

(not just those in senior roles) to build a more inclusive engineering culture.
Maintain strong working relationships with the Central Architecture function -- collaborating with EAs and SAs to ensure coherence while avoiding duplication of responsibilities.
Collaborate closely with Platform Engineering, Security, Support, and QE to ensure architectural decisions support platform adoption, test automation, observability, security, supportability, and compliance.
Ensure Missions are aligned with Platform Engineering's strategy and actively adopt and promote shared tools, templates, and processes.
Help guide squads through modernisation efforts and re-architecting for the cloud.
Promote the early incorporation of security and compliance by equipping engineers with tools that embed easyJet's policies into development processes.
Address inefficiencies and delays caused by under-considered non-production environments by encouraging teams to account for the full application lifecycle during planning and delivery.
Highlight operational and support concerns early, ensuring they are not retrofitted as afterthoughts near go-live
Ensure timely planning for the transition to BAU, avoiding last-minute considerations.
Promote alignment across teams with the agreed environment strategy, working closely with Platform Engineering to embed this into day-to-day engineering practice.
Support onboarding and capability growth for both permanent and supplier engineers through advocacy for architectural standards and reusable assets.
Identify and highlight opportunities for skills development and training that improve the overall engineering capability of the organisation.
Maintain space within the role to explore solutions hands-on -- through prototyping, modelling, and experimentation -- and lead by example.

Requirements of the Role

What you'll bring to the team

Proven expertise in software architecture for cloud-native, distributed systems (e.g. event-driven, serverless, microservices).
Hands-on knowledge of technologies and tooling used across the stack: frontend frameworks, backend platforms, cloud services (especially AWS), CI/CD, infrastructure as code.
Experience working across product and platform boundaries, with an ability to drive alignment and simplification at scale.
Familiarity with a chapter/community of practice model, particularly within large organisations.
Ability to facilitate architectural decisions that balance speed, risk, and long-term maintainability/extensibility.
Strong interpersonal skills -- able to build trust and influence across product managers, delivery leads, engineers at all levels, and enterprise architects.
Comfortable leading through influence rather than line management -- with strong coaching and dotted-line leadership skills.
Adept at defining and evolving lightweight governance approaches, such as architectural decision records (ADRs), shared reference architectures, and reusable design patterns.
Passionate about reducing duplication and enabling teams to move faster with standardised, opinionated tooling.
Committed to building a high-autonomy, low-bureaucracy culture by shaping collaborative ways of working instead of enforcing rigid rules.