Lead Full Stack Engineer - Bristol | London
Spruce
Software Engineering
GBP 85k-130k / year + Equity
Posted on Dec 20, 2025
Lead Full Stack Engineer - Bristol | London
We’re building the software backbone that will help the UK hit net zero by 2050 — and we’re doing it by hitting the number one issue in the UK: homes heated by gas boilers.
Spruce has grown from 0 to 400+ customers in under 18 months, with strong product–market fit, clear momentum, and a team that knows exactly where it’s going. Our ambition is big, our execution is strong — and now we’re looking for exceptional engineers at any level to help us move faster and go further.
About Spruce
Nearly 20% of the UK’s carbon emissions come from heating homes. There is no credible path to net zero without replacing gas and oil boilers — and today, heat pumps are the only scalable alternative.
The problem?
The installation process is slow, fragmented, and painfully manual. This limits how fast installers can grow, puts engineers off retraining, and makes it almost impossible to offer heat pumps when households need urgent heating.
We’re fixing this.
Spruce is building an end-to-end operating system for heat pump installers — from first enquiry through design, installation, and compliance. Our software:
Halves the time installers spend per job
Doubles sales conversion rates
Improves quality, margins, and customer experience
We’ve only just started. With fresh investment and growing demand, our long-term vision is to become the operating system for the entire home renewables supply chain — think ServiceTitan × Procore × CAD, purpose-built for decarbonisation.
The Role
As a Lead Full Stack Engineer, you’ll sit at the intersection of hands-on technical work, team leadership, and product strategy.
You’ll still write code — especially the hard, high-leverage parts — but your impact will increasingly come from setting direction, unblocking others, and raising the bar across the team.
You’ll work closely with engineers, designers, and product leadership to ensure we’re building the right things, in the right way, at the right time.
What you’ll do
Own architecture and technical strategy for a core domain or set of systems
Design and guide complex, cross-cutting solutions that span multiple parts of the product
Write high-leverage code: reference implementations, critical paths, foundational frameworks
Lead technical discussions, make trade-offs explicit, and help teams align
Mentor senior engineers and develop others into technical leaders
Coach engineers in how to make decisions, rather than making every decision yourself
Partner with product leadership to translate business goals into technical strategy
Proactively identify scaling risks, bottlenecks, and areas of technical debt — and drive solutions
Improve team health, processes, and collaboration as the organisation grows
Depending on your background, you may:
Be stepping into your first formal lead role from a senior IC position, or
Have already led teams successfully and want to stay close to the technical work
Either way, we’ll support you in growing your leadership scope over time.
The problem space
Heat loss modelling and hydronic system design
2D and 3D floor-plan tooling using LiDAR and computer vision
Large-scale data ingestion and geospatial analysis
Offline-first, collaborative PWAs
Hardware integrations (Bluetooth measurement tools, sensors, monitoring systems)
This is not CRUD-only work. You’ll be working meaningful production problems from day one that blends physical reality, real-world constraints, and serious impact.
Tech Stack
Our tech stack strives for simplicity, symmetry and efficiency. Our hard problems come from the real world instead of self made architectural problems.
You don’t need to know all of the below but you do need an appetite for full stack mastery and owning the problem end to end.
Docker, Docker Compose
PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Atlas migrations
Node, Prisma
React, Typescript, Konva, Tailwind
About You
We care less about titles and more about impact, judgment, and intent.
You’ll likely have experience with:
Modern JavaScript / TypeScript and frontend frameworks
Backend development and API design
Relational databases and data modelling
solving ambiguous, real-world problems end-to-end
building healthy, high-trust teams
growing others, not just being the smartest person in the room
But more importantly, you are:
Product-minded — you want to understand real users and real problems, not just tickets
Impact-driven — you balance technical quality with momentum and know when “good enough” is exactly right
Comfortable with ownership — you take responsibility for outcomes, not just code
Candid and collaborative — you challenge ideas openly, receive feedback well, and optimise for the team over ego
Whether you’re growing into seniority or already operating at staff/lead level, you’ll find space here to do the best work of your career.
Our offer
Salary (depending on experience, impact, and location): £85–130k
Meaningful slice of equity (options) in the company
33 days holiday and opportunity to work from abroad for another 30 days each year
Hybrid working: 2 days in-person a week (London or Bristol)
Full-team meetups every fortnight with paid travel, accommodation and dinner
Cycle to work scheme
Brilliant team to learn from and massive opportunity to grow
Working at Spruce
We’re currently a close-knit team split between London and Bristol. We spend 2 days each week working together in-person in both locations, and get everyone altogether every fortnight.
You'll have genuine influence from day one. The best idea wins regardless of seniority. We expect you to challenge everything, ask "why?" multiple levels deep, and push back when something doesn't make sense.
We want everyone to spend time with installers on-site, feel their pain points, then be able to rapidly suggest and implement solutions based on real feedback rather than assumptions.
We move fast and ship imperfect things, learning from users rather than trying to perfect in isolation. When things break, we focus on how we fix it, what can we learn and never blame. You'll own your outcomes whilst knowing the team has your back.
Feedback is constant, direct, and kind – we'll tell you when something isn't working and expect the same honesty (and empathy) back.
Ready to apply?
Please fill in your details here and we’ll get back to you ASAP (if you have any issues with the form please let us know by dropping a line to hiring@spruce.eco)
Our process is lightweight and respectful: intro call → take home technical test → technical interview → final in-person team chat