Engineering Team Lead

About Swap

Swap is the infrastructure behind modern agentic commerce. The only AI-native platform connecting backend operations with a forward-thinking storefront experience.

Built for brands that want to sell anything - anywhere, Swap centralises global operations, powers intelligent workflows, and unlocks margin-protecting decisions with real-time data and capability. Our products span cross-border, tax, returns, demand planning, and our next-generation agentic storefront, giving merchants full transparency and the ability to act with confidence.

At Swap, we’re building a culture that values clarity, creativity, and shared ownership as we redefine how global commerce works.

About the Role

We are looking for a Team Lead to found and lead the newly formed Unified Domain Team within our Enablement Group. This is a greenfield, high-leverage role: you will define and drive adoption of Swap's canonical domain entities and API contracts across the entire engineering organisation.

This team exists to solve a real and growing problem — every new partner or market integration today requires bespoke, duplicated engineering effort. You will eliminate that tax by establishing shared, stable, and versioned domain structures that product teams can build on with confidence. The ideal candidate is both a technical leader and a systems thinker who thrives in ambiguous, cross-cutting work and knows how to ship pragmatically without sacrificing long-term integrity.

This is a hands-on role (~50% coding initially) with people leadership responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead a small, focused team with the autonomy and clarity to build foundational infrastructure.

• Define, publish, and version canonical domain models for Swap's core entities.

• Own the delivery of schemas and OpenAPI definitions.

• Establish and maintain a lightweight governance pipeline: review process, ownership model, versioning policy, and deprecation strategy.

• Translating software requirements into working, high-performance software.

• Playing a key role in architectural and design decisions, building toward efficient architecture.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams; work closely with product managers, and other engineers and team leads to gather requirements and translate them into technical specifications.

• Hire, mentor, and grow the team as scope expands.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading or tech-leading an engineering team, including cross-functional collaboration and ownership of architectural decisions.

• 5+ years of backend or full-stack engineering experience, with strong TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js skills.

• Experience designing versioned APIs (REST/OpenAPI and/or GraphQL with schema governance).

• Experience working in platform or infrastructure engineering roles — comfortable with work whose primary customer is other engineers.

• Ability to navigate ambiguity: you can ship a pragmatic V0, articulate why it's the right trade-off, and iterate toward a stronger long-term model.

• Excellent communication skills — you can translate complex technical standards into clear guidance for product engineers.

• Experience with eCommerce systems, partner integrations, or multi-tenant platforms is a strong plus.

• Passion for systems that outlast individuals — documentation, ownership, and tooling are first-class concerns for you.

• A BSc in Computer Science or Mathematics (or equivalent experience).

• Enjoy working in a fast paced, high-growth environment.

Benefits:

• Competitive base salary

• Stock options in a high-growth startup

• Competitive PTO with public holidays additional (and your birthday off!)

• Pension contributions ️

• Private health

• Gym and wellness benefits

• Mental health benefits

• Quarterly team offsite budget

• Thursday happy hour

• Breakfast Mondays

Diversity & Equal Opportunities:

We embrace diversity and equality in a serious way. We are committed to building a team with a variety of backgrounds, skills, and views. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. Creating a culture of equality isn't just the right thing to do; it's also the smart thing.