PHP Tech Lead

 JOB DESCRIPTION

ABOUT GAIN EXPERIENCE

We are GAIN Experience, the digital experience-focused team within GAIN. Our purpose remains unchanged: delivering strategic, user-centred experiences that drive engagement, conversion, and measurable business impact.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This Tech Lead role is the technical owner for our Mumbai-based WordPress and Drupal teams, focused primarily on ExperienceLite and our SLA and support retainers across 50+ client platforms.

You will be accountable for technical quality, stability, security, and delivery across BAU support, minor enhancements, and continuous improvement, while reporting into our Technical Directors and collaborating closely with UK-based delivery, account, and product stakeholders.

Reporting to: Technical Directors

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP

● Take overall responsibility for the technical delivery, quality, and governance of our Mumbai WordPress and Drupal support teams, aligned to standards set by the Technical Directors.

● Own triage and technical prioritisation across support queues, ensuring issues are categorised, routed, and resolved with pace and consistency.

● Lead incident response for production issues, including root cause analysis, clear remediation plans, and preventative actions to reduce repeat incidents.

● Define and uphold best practices for secure development, platform updates, and patching, including vulnerability management and proactive maintenance.

● Own technical scoping and estimating for support and enhancement work, highlighting assumptions, risks, and dependencies early.

● Conduct regular code reviews to ensure quality, consistency, maintainability, and performance across WordPress and Drupal codebases.

GAIN reserves the right to amend or extend this job specification as required. Draft Tech Lead - Mumbai - Job Description

● Take ownership of technical direction and major technical decisions for retainer and ExperienceLite work, consulting Technical Directors where decisions have wider architectural or commercial impact.

● Maintain technical documentation for recurring fixes, release notes, runbooks, and platform patterns, ensuring it is stored and shared appropriately. 

● Stay up to date with relevant CMS ecosystem developments, assess impact, and recommend practical improvements that reduce support load over time.

TEAM LEADERSHIP

● Mentor and coach developers in Mumbai, including regular check-ins, pairing where useful, and hands-on guidance in complex areas. 

● Build a strong support culture focused on ownership, clarity, and predictable delivery, where problems are discussed early and surfaced with solutions. 

● Collaborate with Technical Directors on performance management, annual reviews, objectives, and development plans for the offshore team. 

● Ensure the team is working effectively across multiple client platforms, with clear ways of working, consistent definition of done, and high standards of communication.

● Oversee improvements to processes and tooling that support high-volume support delivery, including automation, templates, and reusable components. 

● Develop capability across WordPress and Drupal support specialisms, including upgrades, security, performance, and reliable release practices.

COMMERCIAL AWARENESS & CONTRIBUTION

● Help ensure SLA commitments are met by maintaining visibility of risk, capacity, time spent vs estimates, and by escalating early where constraints will impact delivery. 

● Partner with UK delivery and account leads to provide clear technical input on prioritisation, sequencing, and trade-offs across the retainer portfolio.

● Assist in the creation of estimates for client change requests, including transparent assumptions and options where scope needs shaping. 

● Drive continuous improvement that increases efficiency and reduces repeat work, including preventative maintenance, platform standardisation, and better observability. 

● Contribute to improving client confidence through clear technical status updates, sensible risk management, and consistent quality of output.

GAIN reserves the right to amend or extend this job specification as required. Draft Tech Lead - Mumbai - Job Description

REQUIREMENTS

● Minimum 5+ years of professional software development experience. 

● Strong hands-on expertise in WordPress and/or Drupal in production environments, including building, maintaining, and supporting live sites.

● Proven experience in support and retainer delivery, including incident management, triage, prioritisation, and working to SLAs.

● Strong engineering fundamentals including Git workflows, code review, testing practices appropriate to context, and disciplined release management.

● Demonstrated ability to diagnose and debug complex production issues, including performance and stability problems. 

● Experience estimating effort and leading technical planning across multiple concurrent workstreams. 

● Experience mentoring developers and embedding technical best practices across a team. 

● Strong stakeholder communication skills, able to explain technical issues and trade-offs clearly to non-technical colleagues. 

● Ability to balance technical excellence with pragmatic, commercially sound solutions in a fast-moving support environment. 

● Calm, structured approach under pressure, with high attention to detail and strong ownership.

GAIN reserves the right to amend or extend this job specification as required.