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Chief Placeholder Officer

  • London
  • Full Time (Permanent)
  • Hybrid
  • Placeholder team
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About this role

Suspense thrives on uncertainty, a calculated pause that draws in the observer. In this pause, placeholders emerge as valuable cues. Their very presence suggests that what is yet unseen could hold the answers, a revelation or a solution. When used thoughtfully, a placeholder can tease and compel, engaging the imagination.

Responsibilities

In websites, a loading spinner is no different than the ellipsis of a suspenseful plot twist; it tells the viewer that what is coming is worth waiting for. Key benefits of effective placeholders include:

  • Maintaining engagement: By signaling more to come, placeholders prevent user drop-off.
  • Setting expectations: Clear, well-placed placeholders hint at what content is coming next, adding structure.
  • Building suspense: The anticipation of more content holds attention, just as in storytelling.

Placeholder content, however, must tread a careful line. Too sparse, and it risks undermining its own suspense; too dense, and it overwhelms with unnecessary clutter. The balance lies in leaving just enough room for the mind to wander and fill the gaps.

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Technical Product Manager (Superapp)

  • London
  • Full Time (Permanent)
  • Hybrid
  • SuperApp Product
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About the role

We're building a larger, dedicated Platform team at Lendable to reinvest in infrastructure after a deliberate trade-off earlier in the year prioritised new product development. Platform work has been largely invisible to leadership, and without commercial and prioritisation accountability it's been hard to prioritise effectively or connect engineering effort to customer and revenue outcomes.

That's changing. We're hiring a Technical PM to sit within engineering and own the intersection between platform infrastructure and commercial value - not a traditional feature PM, not a people manager and not a project manager: you set priorities, not schedules. The TPM is a commercially accountable IC who owns platform stability and outcomes, embedded in the engineering team.

The core tension you'll resolve: platform engineers make decisions without enough business context; product teams don't always understand what platform work enables or what it costs to defer it. You own both sides of that translation.

This is an IC role with hands-on technical contribution expected, writing code, reviewing PRs, participating in architecture design. That credibility with senior engineers isn't optional; it's how the role works.

You'll partner closely with the Platform Engineering Manager (who owns people and delivery) and the Platform Tech Lead (who owns technical direction and standards). You set what we build and why; they set how the team runs and how it's built. You and the EM are tightly coupled and work from one shared roadmap: you set and sequence priorities, the EM commits capacity and delivery against them.

What you'll be doing

Own platform stability

  • Own platform stability as a primary accountability - SLA/SLO metrics, incident rates, release quality.

  • Hold release gating authority: block features from production that don't meet testing standards or introduce unacceptable regression risk.

  • Enforce CI/CD standards centrally so pods don't fragment into one-off solutions.

  • Track and report stability metrics alongside commercial outcomes - stability is the foundation that makes the rest possible.

Be commercially accountable

  • Own the business case for platform investment and answer "why are we spending six engineers on this for three months?" in terms leadership understands.

  • Track platform impact in business terms: developer velocity, incident cost, time-to-market, reliability, capacity - e.g. "CXO rollout removes a 3-second API fan-out, reducing session abandonment" or "we can now handle 20k simultaneous logins".

  • Input into headcount and investment decisions for the platform team.

Own the platform roadmap

  • Own the platform backlog, prioritised by business value and sequenced to unblock the highest-value product teams first - not driven by technical debt or engineer preference alone.

  • Make trade-offs explicit: "if we do X now, we defer Y by Z weeks - here's what that means for products depending on us".

  • Ensure every initiative has a defined success metric that non-engineers can track.

Be the stakeholder interface

  • Act as the single point of contact for Pod Leads: business requirements coming from pods and engineering/developer requirements flowing to pods; prioritise both in service of platform stability.

  • Make platform work visible to leadership - regular forums with product MDs and PMs to capture upcoming dependencies before they become blockers; represent platform work in leadership reviews; translate technical milestones into business milestones.

  • Drive cross-team collaboration and buy-in with other PMs; engage architecture in technical design.

  • Escalate when product teams make requests that would create unsustainable platform load or technical debt.

Contribute as an engineer

  • Write code, review PRs, and participate in architecture design as a core part of the role - not a side project.

  • Bring a strong technical voice to roadmap decisions without owning final architecture calls (that's Architecture and Tech Leads).

What we're looking for

Essential

  • Deep, hands-on engineering background - this role must be staffed by someone who has shipped production systems, not someone who has only managed backlogs.

  • Strong commercial instinct: can build a business case, speak to P&L impact, and hold a line on ROI.

  • Exceptional stakeholder management across product, engineering, and finance without direct line authority over all of them.

  • Comfortable with ambiguity - platform value is often indirect and long-horizon.

  • Track record of contributing as an IC while operating at a senior, cross-team level.

  • Proactive, low-ego, and clear communicator - able to hold a line with leadership and pod leads alike.

Nice to have

  • Experience in platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling contexts.

  • Familiarity with SLA/SLO frameworks and incident management at scale.

  • Experience enforcing CI/CD standards across multiple teams or pods.

  • Prior work making "invisible" infrastructure legible to non-technical leadership.

Our tech stack

Platform & backend: Kotlin, AWS, Postgres, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes.

Gateway & clients: Node GraphQL gateway, React Native / TypeScript mobile app, Relay.

Tooling & observability: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jira, Confluence, Datadog, Sentry, Grafana.

Interview process

  • Quick call with the Talent Team (30 minutes)

  • Hiring manager interview (30 minutes)

  • Technical and Product interview (90 minutes)

  • Culture-add interview (60 minutes)

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About Lendable

A large group of around 50 people, and one dog, in an office facing the camera and smiling

Lendable is on a mission to build the world's best technology to help people get credit and save money.

  • Founded in 2014

  • Profitable since 2017

  • Unicorn in 2021

  • Backed by Balderton, Goldman Sachs and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan

  • Loved by customers & employees with top reviews on Glassdoor and Trustpilot

So far, we’ve rebuilt the big three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days. We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do. We’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes.

Life at Lendable

Two people with laptops on their lap sat either side of a black labrador on a sofa in front of a window. The dog is a very good girl.
  • The opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies

  • Best-in-class compensation, including equity

  • You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish - on the other days we all come together IRL to be together, build and exchange ideas

  • Our in-house chefs prepare fresh, healthy lunches in the office every Tuesday-Thursday

  • We care for our Lendies’ well-being both physically and mentally, so we offer coverage when it comes to private health insurance

  • We're an equal opportunity employer and are keen to make Lendable the most inclusive and open workspace in London

Check out our Glassdoor Reviews