Lead Developer wanted for work that requires human thinking.

Not a ticket queue.
Not one microservice in an engineering org of fifty.
Building where you watch real people use the thing, then go and fix what wasn’t obvious.

About Thunk

We’re a small Digital Innovation company, mostly remote, occasionally Kings Cross, London. We work across all sorts of innovation projects: climate infrastructure, healthcare systems, emerging tech. We’re deep into what we do. So deep that we’re quietly very good at it.

We design things people actually use. Increasingly, we build them too. We need someone to own how.

Your work

You’ll be Thunk’s lead developer: the person who owns how we build, not just what gets built. Most of your week goes on our flagship climate project. You’ll lead its frontend and work directly with the client and partner teams.

The rest goes across Thunk: prototypes we test with real users, our own products and internal tools. And the bit that’s yours to shape: how we review, test, ship and run our own services. In time, who joins you.

Day-to-day, you’ll work closely with the whole team. Nine people, so the org chart is more of an org sentence. We’re a close, friendly bunch. Small team, short line to decisions.

The flagship project

It’s a climate resilience platform for UK infrastructure. It helps network operators understand how climate threats spread across connected systems.

It’s a long-running, multi-phase programme delivered by a consortium. Thunk designs and builds the frontend; partner teams own the backend, data and hosting.

Frontend: Next.js with IBM’s Carbon Design System
Data: partner APIs, a knowledge graph and GeoServer map data
Code and delivery: GitLab with CI/CD pipelines
Auth: Keycloak
Releases: feature branches, merge requests, tagged release candidates, then production
Environments: six — dev, staging and production, each mirrored as a demo running synthetic data

We’ll share more about the project and the partners behind it at interview.

What you’ll do

Lead the frontend: architecture, code quality, performance and releases.
Set technical direction with the client and partner teams, and turn it into a plan.
Build Thunk’s designs into map-led features — asset visualisation, prioritisation, export, onboarding.
Integrate with partner APIs and GeoServer layers across all six environments.
Own the release process in GitLab: reviews, tagged release candidates, production deploys.
Keep the demo environments sharp for stakeholder presentations.
Sit in on user testing, and turn what you see into fixes.
Pay down tech debt — maybe starting with a smoother local setup — and keep the docs current.

Shaping how Thunk builds

Set our engineering standards: code review, testing, CI/CD and documentation.
Lead technical scoping in discovery and pitches — approach, estimates, risks.
Make infrastructure and tooling decisions, including how we run our own services.
Explore where AI belongs in the products we build for clients.
Mentor other developers, and help hire the next ones as we grow.

Across Thunk

Build prototypes for client discovery: real enough to test, quick enough to throw away.
Contribute to Thunk’s own external products, internal automations and websites.
Bring a developer’s view into early design and research: what’s feasible, quick or risky.

You

You’ve shipped enough production code to have opinions, and enough to hold them loosely.
You’ve integrated with APIs you don’t own, and written the calm, precise issue when they broke.
You notice when the spacing’s off. (You’ll work with designers. They’ll notice too.)
Accessibility is your default, not a ticket for later.
Code review is a habit, whoever (or whatever) wrote it. You’re as good at taking it as giving it.
You can explain a trade-off to a client with words regular humans use.
You use AI coding tools daily, and still read the diff.

What you’ll bring

If you tick most of the boxes below but not all, apply anyway. The people who hesitate are usually the ones we want.

5+ years building and shipping production software, ideally in a consultancy or agency.
Strong React, Next.js and TypeScript, and modern CSS.
A track record of owning projects end to end, from requirements to production.
CI/CD and infrastructure in practice: pipelines, multiple environments, infrastructure as code.

Nice to have

Web mapping: GeoServer, WMS/WFS, or libraries like Mapbox, OpenLayers or Leaflet.
IBM Carbon or another enterprise design system.
AWS, Terraform or OpenTofu, and OpenID Connect auth such as Keycloak.
Knowledge graphs, linked data, or data visualisation with D3 or WebGL.
Node.js services, PHP, or automation tools like n8n.
Climate, infrastructure, utilities or public-sector work.
Mentoring developers, or supporting user research and usability testing.

The catch

It’s a consortium project. We own the frontend; partners own the backend, data and hosting. Some days you’ll be waiting on someone else’s roadmap. Six environments. The local setup could be smoother. Fixing might be your first job. You’ll set the standards rather than inherit them. Great if that excites you, less great if you’d rather someone else made the calls.

If you want a large engineering team to disappear into, this isn’t for you. Short feedback loop. No hiding.

Fit

We’re a small, remote-first team, allergic to consultant-speak and innovation theatre. We have hard earned values we stand by, we hope you will too. Feedback between the team is always direct rather than softened, because there’s no time for any other way. We care about craft over hype, and about the people behind the work more than the jargon we could wrap around it. We’re humanist technologists, so if you like humans AND technology you’ll fit right in. A dry sense of humour also helps.

Technology

We’ll supply everything you need to get the job done. Shiny laptop, any other hardware, licences and subscriptions to the tools you need. We’re pretty flexible here too.

Shape

Mostly remote (ad hoc meet-ups), full-time permanent, salaried. £50–70k (DOE) full-time. 25 days holiday, Xmas shutdown.

There’s room to grow, too. The role starts as lead developer; where it goes from there is largely up to you.