Senior Software Engineer in Portsmouth

Founded in 2008, CitNOW is an innovative, enterprise-level software product suite that allows automotive dealerships globally to sell more vehicles and parts more profitably. CitNOW’s app-based platform provides a secure, brand-compliant solution for dealers to build trust, transparency and long-lasting relationships. CitNOW Group was formed in 2021 to unite a portfolio of 12 global software companies leveraging innovation to aid retailers and manufacturers in delivering an outstanding customer experience. We have over 300 employees worldwide who all contribute to our vision to provide market-leading automotive solutions to drive efficiencies, seamlessly transforming every customer moment.

The CitNOW Group is no ordinary technology company; we live a series of One Team values and this guiding principle forms the foundation of CitNOW Group’s award-winning, collaborative and inclusive culture.

We’re looking for a senior engineering leader to shape and lead our full-stack technology unit. This role will oversee both front-end and full-stack teams, driving the development of a new, strategic product in our growing SaaS portfolio. This individual will lead our efforts on the platform, establishing best practice, ways of working and holding internal and external contributors to the project to high standards. We’re looking for an agentic engineer who takes ownership and uses modern AI tools (e.g., Claude, Codex) as a force multiplier, with key experience working with agents, setting clear guardrails, and guiding AI outputs toward production-quality results. This role is expected to be a subject matter expert in front-end technologies and will provide coaching and mentoring to front-end and full-stack engineers around them. This role will also line manage more junior colleagues, setting objectives and helping to develop their careers.

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead and inspire your team of Engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation and excellence.
• Line management responsibilities, including setting clear goals, providing guidance and conducting performance reviews to ensure engineers meet their potential.
• Coordinate with cross-functional teams to align development efforts with overall project goals.
• Serve as a mentor and role model for team members, providing guidance and support in their career development.
• Drive the technical direction of full stack software engineering for Portal and sibling projects.
• Help drive the technical direction of front-end engineering within CitNOW (and other teams/functions as required).
• Create elegant and maintainable code to drive consistency and predictability.
• Collaborate with product owners to ensure technical solutions align with business objectives.
• Collaborate and support product owners in running agile ceremonies and conducting refinement sessions.
• Stay updated with industry best practices and emerging technologies to guide the team in making informed technical decisions.
• Ensure code quality and adherence to best practices, conducting code reviews and implementing coding standards.
• A key responsibility is to help define these standards and ensure they are adhered to across the front-end team.
• Help implement and enforce responsible use of AI in the SDLC, driving efficiency and quality, whilst retaining control/oversight.
• Implement and maintain automated testing processes appropriate tools to guarantee the reliability and stability of applications.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement in coding and development processes, with a strong focus on test automation.

We're looking for:

• Demonstrated technical leadership experience, including mentoring developers, setting standards, and guiding delivery.
• Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript across both frontend and backend development.
• Extensive experience building scalable applications using React (modern patterns, hooks, performance optimisation).
• Experience working with modern AI tools (e.g., Claude, Codex) and an understanding of how to validate, test, and refine its work to meet high engineering standards.
• Strong expertise in Node.js backend development, preferably with NestJS or similar frameworks.
• Solid understanding of state management and data-fetching strategies (e.g. Redux Toolkit, React Query).
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL, with experience using ORMs such as Prisma.
• Experience designing and working with event-driven and asynchronous systems (e.g. Kafka, message queues, background job processing with Redis/BullMQ).
• Familiarity with authentication and authorisation mechanisms, including JWT and OAuth2/OIDC providers (e.g. Keycloak).
• Strong understanding of testing strategies, including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing (e.g. Jest, Vitest, Playwright).
• Experience integrating with cloud services, preferably AWS (e.g. S3, Secrets Manager).

In addition to a competitive salary, our benefits package is second to none. Employee wellbeing is at the heart of our people strategy, with a number of innovative wellness initiatives such as flexi-time, where employees can vary their start and finish times within our core business hours and/or extend their lunch break by up to 2 hours per day. Employees also benefit from an additional two half days paid leave per year to focus on their personal wellbeing. We recognise the development of our people is vital to the ongoing success of the business and proudly promote a culture of continuous learning and improvement, along with opportunities to develop and progress a successful career with us. The CitNOW Group is an equal opportunities employer that celebrates diversity across our international teams. We are passionate about creating an inclusive workplace where everyone’s individuality is valued.