Engineering Team Lead | Tech | London, UK

Savanta is looking for an experienced engineering team lead to lead an agile team building a cutting-edge AI platform for market research.
About Us:
Savanta is a leading data, market research and advisory company helping the world's leading brands make better decisions, faster. With over 500 people across offices in multiple countries, we combine deep research expertise, proprietary technology and high-impact consulting to give our clients a complete view of their markets, their customers and their competitors.
About the Role:
Modern AI has created new possibilities in market research, the ability to use real world market data and AI models to generate synthetic responses to market research questions. You will lead the team responsible for Virtual Personas, Savanta’s synthetic personas solution built using our unique data set.
This role is based in our London office, with the expectation to be onsite 1-3 days per week. All candidates will be considered equally, however, unfortunately we are unable to offer visa sponsorship.
You will lead up to 4 engineers working in a cross functional agile team alongside a product manager, with input from our UX designer and QA teams. The team is to deliver the product roadmap alongside driving further adoption of cloud first technologies; we are Azure based, with PostgreSQL and MongoDB as our primary data stores and a multi-provider LLM stack (OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic).
We want you to dive in, get your hands dirty, and figure things out, but also to be someone your team can rely on for help and guidance when they need it.
Our Tech Team works within a learning and collaborative environment, where empowerment is key to our success, along with developing a culture of innovation and creating an environment where everyone can excel.
This is a great opportunity to lead engineering in a totally new field using cutting edge technology. Virtual Personas sits at the frontier of applied AI in the industry and has the potential to fundamentally change the way market research is done. Savanta intends to be a pioneer in this area and is putting in the investment to ensure that happens.
You'll also be responsible for:
Part of a team responsible for setting direction for Virtual Personas
Delivery of the Product roadmap
Managing a team consisting of a range of skillsets and experience
Full stack development, across Python/FastAPI services and React/TypeScript front ends
Continuously improving the team's processes for iterative development, including embedding automated testing and CI quality gates into a fast-moving AI product
Championing the responsible and secure use of LLMs - including prompt-injection awareness, defensive design, and sound data handling for personas built on real respondent data
Setting technical direction for the team
Interacting directly with customers, understanding their needs, and generalising them
Finding ways to build fast, scalable, flexible systems without blowing the budget
Mentoring, supporting, and encouraging our developers
Conducting regular 121's, setting objectives and assisting with tailored development plans
Our engineering environment includes technologies such as Python (FastAPI), LangChain/ LangGraph for multi-agent LLM orchestration, React/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Azure (App Service, Container Registry, Blob Storage), Docker, GitHub Actions, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
About You:
You will have a strong engineering background, and a track record of leading teams that have launched and scaled up new products while maintaining good engineering practices. You will be innovative and comfortable with working in a rapidly evolving business area.
Essential Criteria:
Experience leading agile rapid release iterations, ideally on fast-moving AI/LLM-powered products
Extensive experience specifically with Python and modern async web frameworks, or experience in closely related languages
Hands-on experience building or maintaining LLM-powered applications - prompt design, multi-provider integration, and agent orchestration (e.g. LangChain/LangGraph or an equivalent framework)
Strong RDBMS experience (e.g. PostgreSQL) and comfort with document stores (e.g. MongoDB) and caching layers (e.g. Redis)
Comfortable working with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) as part of the daily workflow
A willingness to learn - new technologies (including emerging AI tooling), our business and platform, and ways of working - is an absolute must
Full product delivery mindset focused on a tested user experience
Encourages a test-first approach as part of stories, aiming for high automated coverage, and comfortable establishing CI quality gates (lint, type-check, test) where they don't yet exist
Runs meetings such as project kick-offs, stakeholder check-ins, and retrospectives
Comfortable with some ambiguity and shifting priorities in your work environment, and comfortable with managed change
Confident in using spikes to de-risk work as well as guiding the team in iterating towards a long-term scalable architecture - including hardening AI features against risks such as prompt injection and unbounded model behaviour
Desirable Criteria:
Experience with FastAPI, async SQLAlchemy, and/or Node/Express
Experience with React/TypeScript front-end development
Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, or other multi-agent/LLM orchestration frameworks
Experience configuring Azure services (App Service, Container Registry, Blob Storage) or AWS equivalents
Familiarity with LLM observability/evaluation tooling (e.g. Langfuse) and resilience patterns for third-party AI providers (e.g. circuit breakers, provider fallback)
Awareness of data protection and AI transparency considerations relevant to handling panel/respondent data and AI-generated outputs (e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act) - as context for engineering decisions, not as a compliance determination
Experience/inter

Employment type
Full-Time

Work arrangement
No