Technical Lead
About this role
About us
Appnovation is the AI Product Company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with teams around the world, Appnovation builds AI products, delivers enterprise AI and digital solutions, and co-invests with clients to bring new AI products to market.
Open source has been the foundation of Appnovation's work since 2007, and it remains the foundation underneath every AI product the company builds today. Appnovation teams work with organizations in highly regulated industries, including global leaders such as Pfizer, Google and AstraZeneca, to help them adopt AI they can govern and own.
About the role
We are hiring a UK-based Technical Lead to work with our existing global team and promote quality and excellence in our web-based solution delivery.
Our team builds and runs corporate and enterprise-scale web properties on a composable stack: headless CMS, Node and React front ends, and the integrations that connect them to the client's wider platform.
You will be the team's technical voice to the client as well as leading the development of your assigned projects. You will work with the team to translate business goals into a clear deliverable technical plan while communicating trade-offs, risk and progress to stakeholders.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will plan, code and review, while being accountable for the technical outcome of the project team.
What you will do
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.