Tech Lead

Overview

Principal Engineer on WPP Open, WPP's AI-enabled marketing operating system. You own architecture and engineering standards for full-stack engineering across teams, stay hands-on, and set the bar for hiring. The role is backend-heavy and includes building the React interfaces for the features you deliver.

What you'll do

• Own the architecture of TypeScript and Node.js or Python systems across multiple teams, and set the technical roadmap that takes them from where they are today to where the platform needs to be.
• Stay hands-on: write, review and ship production code, lead by example on test-driven development, profiling and AI-first delivery, and take on the hardest technical problems yourself.
• Set and maintain engineering standards for API design, data, reliability, security, observability and testing; publish them as a style guide and reference architectures, certify teams against them, and decide on exceptions.
• Review designs and architecture decision records across teams, challenge assumptions, and make sure decisions are made on evidence and recorded with their trade-offs.
• Decide, with Platform Engineering, how we use AWS Lambda and Kubernetes, and own the cost, capacity and reliability consequences of those choices.
• Lead the response to the most serious production incidents and performance problems, find the root cause and make sure it does not happen again.
• Drive large-scale change such as migrations, framework upgrades and deprecations across many codebases through to completion, including switching off what has been replaced.
• Define how we build with AI: the models, SDKs and agentic frameworks we use, how Claude Code is used day to day, and how AI-written code and AI features are evaluated and released.
• Work with product, engineering and business leaders in other regions to shape what we build, turn business goals into technical plans, and make trade-offs visible.
• Set the hiring bar for full-stack engineers at every level, write interview material, calibrate interviewers and give recruiters clear screening criteria.
• Mentor senior engineers, grow the next generation of technical leaders, and build a community of practice through reviews, talks and knowledge sharing.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 11 years of professional software development in TypeScript and Node.js or Python, including 5 years of architecture across multiple systems.
• 3 years of experience owning engineering standards adopted beyond your own team, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Experience working in globally distributed teams across time zones, with engineering, product and business stakeholders in other regions.
• Expert in TypeScript with Node.js or in Python, and a practitioner in the other.
• Set backend and frontend coding patterns, framework choices and upgrade path, and practitioner in at least two other crafts.
• Set full-stack conventions across teams: where logic lives, how APIs serve user interfaces, and how shared components are built and maintained.
• Design REST APIs with OpenAPI from first principles: resource modelling, HTTP semantics, pagination, consistent error formats, versioning, idempotency and rate limiting.
• Know when to use JSON and when to use Protocol Buffers, and how to evolve both without breaking consumers.
• Fluent in PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, query plans, transactions and zero-downtime migrations with Prisma, TypeORM or SQLAlchemy.
• Design DynamoDB and MongoDB models around access patterns, use Redis for caching, and choose the right store for each workload.
• Design event-driven systems on queues and streams such as SQS, Kafka and BullMQ or Celery, using retries, dead-letter queues and idempotent consumers so that at-least-once delivery is safe.
• Know the outbox and saga patterns and when orchestration is better than choreography.
• Built and run production services on AWS or GCP, both as Lambda functions and as Kubernetes workloads, understanding cold starts, concurrency, cost, capacity and deployment risk.
• Define infrastructure as code with Terraform or AWS CDK and release safely with canary and blue/green deployments.
• Practise test-driven development and build balanced test suites: unit tests with Jest, Vitest or pytest, integration tests with Testcontainers, contract tests with Pact, and Playwright end-to-end tests that gate releases.
• Instrument services with OpenTelemetry and use Datadog and CloudWatch; profile with flame graphs, measure p95 and p99 latency, and fix causes rather than symptoms.
• Apply the OWASP Top 10 and API Security Top 10 in practice.
• Design authentication and authorisation with OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, secure service-to-service traffic with mTLS and workload identity, and integrate identity providers such as Okta, Keycloak and Cognito.
• Design systems that span many services and teams, and write architecture decision records that make the trade-offs explicit.
• Work trunk-based with GitHub Flow, small changes and feature flags, and know CI/CD pipelines inside out.
• Have led deprecations and migrations all the way to switching the old system off.
• Use Claude Code every day and understand how large language models work: tokens, context windows, cost, structured output, embeddings and retrieval.
• Have built production features with the Anthropic and OpenAI SDKs, including tool calling and evaluations, and designed agentic services with clear guardrails and human review.
• Communicate clearly and concisely in writing and in conversation, adapting the message for engineers, product leaders and executives.
• Collaborate well across locations and cultures, working asynchronously and handing over cleanly between time zones.
• Lead without authority and influence engineering heads and teams across the organisation.
• Mentor senior engineers into technical leaders and hold the bar under commercial pressure.

Nice to have

• B.Tech or B.E. in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field.
• Experience maintaining a widely used open-source library.
• Experience with multi-region and disaster-recovery architecture.
• Experience mapping engineering controls to SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
• Experience with multi-agent systems and agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Google ADK or the Anthropic Agent SDK.
• Experience running an engineering-productivity measurement programme.
• Experience in the second backend language.

Details

• Location: Gurgaon, India.
• Hybrid, with teams in the office around four days a week.
• Interviews are practical and hands-on.