Lead Software Engineer (City of London)

At Beam, you get to do work that matters. We’re solving the world’s toughest social problems. And we’re growing fast. It’s not easy. Nothing worth doing ever is. But we take care of everyone who works here with everything from coaching to personal budgets and pay highly competitively.

You’ll be joining a company that’s having a huge impact on people’s lives with a culture where you can be yourself, have fun and progress rapidly. We’re quickly expanding the breadth of our product offering at Beam with revolutionary, AI-powered products that have the potential to transform the effectiveness of caseworkers and social workers globally - our first one is MagicNotes.

The opportunity at Beam: We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer, reporting to the CTO, with a product-mindset and a passion for AI to lead one of our product teams to help build the future of Beam with the right technologies. It’s a passionate and growing team (doubled in size in 2024) and values autonomy, empowerment and bias-to-action.

What you’ll be doing:

• Leading a team of talented engineers to build out our AI offerings in MagicNotes - from process to mentoring to technical architecture.
• Help build our technology for the future - be it infrastructure or front-end. We value generalists.
• Work with product, design, commercial and analytics to figure out what new features to build within our product.
• Building internal tools - for our team to help as many people as efficiently as possible.
• Using the latest generative AI tooling to empower our caseworkers to focus on what matters, helping those in need.
• Get deep into the power of the LLMs that exist and figure out ideal optimisations across our systems with them.

Why is this exciting?

• You will have the flexibility to run the team as you see fit and bring in other great engineers from companies to build an amazing team.
• Our MagicNotes product is already used by hundreds of case workers a day - you will have an opportunity to figure out the future of it or you’ll be designing and defining the future of our BeamForce product.
• AI is moving so unbelievably fast that you’ll be constantly looking at opportunities to integrate more into our core offerings.
• You will have a high degree of autonomy working with other exceptional and like-minded engineers and product people.
• You will see your features used by people who really need them - and see the amazing 5-star feedback we get in return for building these critical features.

Who we’re looking for:

• Wants to move into management or has management experience and is keen to build a high-performance engineering culture.
• Breadth of experience across infrastructure, backend and frontend technology stacks.
• We use the latest Ruby on Rails, Turbo, Phlex, AlpineJS, TailwindCSS, AWS, PostgresSQL to name a few technologies.
• Has worked in complex software systems - both front-end and back-end and understands the importance of good data structures, a scalable architecture and constantly evolving tech stack.
• You care about the “right tool for the right job” and pick the pragmatic options when building software.
• Enjoys working in cross-functional teams - PMs, UX, Designers and Data.
• You have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to make data-informed decisions.
• You have an entrepreneurial, get-things-done attitude.
• You’ll contribute to fostering a culture of psychological safety, inclusivity, collaboration and continuous improvement within the team through participation in retrospectives and feedback.
• You’re passionate about social mobility.

We have a strong preference for London-based engineers who can regularly meet the team to problem solve in person. We’re committed to advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion through our work as an organisation, and that starts with the team we build. 53% of the people we support are from global majority backgrounds and 17% have disabilities. We believe we serve these people best when we’re a diverse and inclusive team. To that end, we particularly welcome applications from global majority candidates and/or those who’ve experienced social disadvantage.

What we’ll give back to you:

• £100k-140k (dependent on experience - we’ll have an open discussion).
• Access to therapy, coaching, classes & content - powered by Oliva.
• Generous EMI-qualifying share options.
• Annual company festival to build a great Beam culture.
• 1:1 workplace coaching with More Happi.
• Regular team talks from leading UK tech entrepreneurs.
• Free subscription to Calm meditation app.
• Discounted bike and accessories with Cyclescheme.
• Discounted tech products with Techscheme.
• Generous Holiday - 25 days + 3 additional days over the Christmas period + bank holidays.
• Pension scheme where we contribute 3% of your salary and you contribute 5%.
• Your own financial well-being coach, through Bippit.

We work hard to make sure every employee is given the freedom, tools, trust, and support to do the best work of their careers.

All our interviews are currently conducted over Google Meet. It usually takes us a week to get back to you after each round. Due to a high number of applications, we are unfortunately unable to offer feedback before Round 2. Feedback for subsequent rounds is provided if requested.

Application process: We take hiring seriously. We have a 4-stage and an optional 5th interview process, giving you plenty of time to learn about Beam while we get to know you.

• 30 mins with our Talent team.
• 45 minute Interview with David our CTO.
• 1.5 hour technical test with one of Beam's senior engineers.
• 1 hour product and cultural interview with one of Beam's product managers and a member of the engineering/design team.