Software Engineer in Brighton

Office: Hybrid, with at least one Brighton office day per week

Salary: £40,000 to £60,000 depending on experience

Level: Mid-level

Workshop by Bikebook builds software for repair and service businesses. We started with bike repair shops, helping them manage bookings, jobs, customers and day-to-day workshop operations. That is still a big part of what we do, but the product is now moving into a broader space: repairs, stock, retail, POS, ecommerce, customer management and workflows for other service-led businesses.

We are growing the engineering team and looking for a software engineer who wants to work closely with the product, customers and technical decisions. This is a mid-level role in a small product and engineering team. You would be joining as our third software engineer, so you will get more ownership than you might in a larger company, but you will not be expected to be expert in every area on day one. We are looking for someone who can own meaningful work, learn quickly, communicate clearly and make pragmatic engineering decisions.

For this hire, the strongest current need is React-heavy product engineering. The role still has product and platform breadth, but we need someone who is comfortable building, debugging and maintaining real frontend workflows in React and TypeScript. Our day-to-day stack is mainly C#/.NET on the backend and TypeScript, React and Next.js on the frontend, with some mobile work in React Native. The product also involves relational data, APIs, background jobs, third-party integrations, observability, CI/CD and production systems. You do not need to know every part of this stack already, but you should be comfortable learning across it.

What you’ll be working on

• Product features: You might build new workflows for bookings, repairs, stock, payments, ecommerce, POS, customer management and reporting, mostly in the web app and sometimes in our mobile app.
• Frontend product engineering: You might work on React and TypeScript features where state, data loading, error handling, form behaviour, table behaviour, and maintainability matter.
• Platform and integrations: You might work on APIs, webhooks, background jobs, realtime updates, event-driven parts of the system and third-party integrations.
• Performance, reliability and engineering quality: You might improve busy parts of the app, including React rendering, data loading, caching, observability and production debugging.

This is a good fit for someone who enjoys product engineering but also wants technical depth. You will own meaningful product work across the frontend, backend and the systems behind the product.

What we’re looking for

This role is likely to suit someone with roughly 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, especially if you have shipped and maintained production web applications. The exact number of years matters less than whether you can own work, learn quickly and make good decisions.

You should be able to:

• Build maintainable React and TypeScript features in a production web app;
• Reason clearly about state, derived data, loading states, error states and retries;
• Debug UI behaviour by checking the data, the rendered app and the code path;
• Make sensible choices about component boundaries, hooks and naming;
• Test your work properly, or explain the right test when time is tight;
• Take a vague product or technical problem and turn it into a clear plan;
• Work independently without needing every step defined;
• Communicate clearly when tradeoffs, risks or uncertainty appear;
• Understand a product area quickly;
• Make pragmatic decisions without creating unnecessary complexity;
• Care about the product and customer experience, not just the code.

You should also have experience working with production web applications. You do not need to know our exact stack already, but you should be comfortable with things like APIs, relational data, asynchronous or background work, performance tradeoffs and unfamiliar codebases. Backend and platform experience are useful here, but they are not a substitute for strong frontend judgement. We need someone who can be trusted with React-heavy product work and can also understand enough of the surrounding system to make good decisions. You do not need to be an expert in every area. We are looking for someone who can take ownership, improve quickly and be trusted with important product and engineering work.

Useful but not required

Experience with any of the following would be useful, but none are hard requirements:

• C# or .NET;
• Payments, ecommerce, POS, stock, inventory or booking systems;
• APIs, webhooks or third-party integrations;
• Observability, performance tuning or production debugging;
• Working in a small company or product-led team;
• Mobile development experience, especially React Native.

How we work

Our office is in Portslade, in the Brighton & Hove area. Different teams use the office differently: some people are in most days, some a couple of times a month, and some a couple of days a week. For this role, we would like you to be in the office at least one day per week. Tuesday or Thursday usually works best because those are the days you are most likely to overlap with product, engineering and leadership. You should be within reasonable commuting distance of Brighton and comfortable joining the team in person regularly.

We are a small company, so you will work closely with the founders, product and customer-facing people. You will get a lot of context, and you will be expected to use that context when making decisions. We value clear communication, pragmatic engineering and people who want to understand the real problems our customers are trying to solve. There is currently no formal out-of-hours on-call rota. Engineers do help investigate production issues during working hours, and very rare serious incidents are handled collaboratively by the team.

What success looks like

In your first few months, success would look like:

• Understanding the product and codebase well enough to make safe, useful changes;
• Shipping one or two meaningful product improvements, likely with a strong frontend component;
• Improving an area of reliability, performance or developer experience;
• Building trust with product, support and the founders;
• Becoming someone who can own a problem from customer need through to production.

£40,000 to £60,000 salary depending on experience, pension, hybrid working, usually one office day per week, flexibility around normal life commitments.

Hiring process

We want the process to be useful for both sides and as close to the real work as possible. The process is usually:

• Practical working session, around 60 minutes;
• Final team conversation, if useful, ideally in person in Brighton. We do not use brainteasers or algorithm puzzles. The practical working session is based on the kind of product and engineering work you would actually do here. There is no unpaid take-home project. The practical working session is live and collaborative. We use AI tools day to day, but the practical coding session is AI-free. You can use normal documentation, search and reference material. We ask for no AI assistance during the practical so we can see your own React, debugging and product judgement. We assess how you understand the problem, communicate, make tradeoffs, test assumptions and respond to feedback. We are not testing memorised syntax or algorithm tricks. We aim to run the whole process over two to three weeks where schedules allow, and we will keep candidates updated between stages.

Inclusion and adjustments

We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. You do not need a computer science degree to apply. If you need adjustments during the hiring process, let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Right to work

You will need the right to work in the UK. We are not currently able to sponsor visas.