Staff Software Engineer | Console in London

Meet DeepL. DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski, DeepL now has around 1,000 passionate employees and is supported by world-renowned investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures. Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact. To achieve this, we need talented people like you to join our journey.

What sets us apart is our blend of cutting-edge AI technology, meaningful work, and a culture where people truly thrive. We’re a team of innovators, researchers, and creators driven by a shared purpose to unlock human potential by making work simpler, smarter, and more connected.

Console is the platform layer that powers DeepL's logged-in enterprise product. We own the navigation shell, access control infrastructure, design system, subscription and entitlements model, and the integration contracts that let product teams across DeepL ship enterprise features without reinventing solved problems. Our mandate is to evolve Console from a collection of features into a coherent, extensible platform that gives enterprise customers confidence to manage their organisations and gives DeepL's product teams the foundations to build fast without creating fragmentation.

Your responsibilities:

• Define and own the architectural direction for one or more of Console's platform pillars, setting integration contracts, driving standards adoption, and ensuring consistency across the teams that build on top of our shared platform.
• Lead architectural decision-making across Console's sub-teams and product verticals, authoring RFCs and design documents that are adopted across engineering and shape how DeepL builds logged-in product surfaces.
• Reduce coordination overhead between Console and dependent product teams by designing self-service integration patterns, documented contracts, and governed processes that remove Console as a delivery bottleneck.
• Own the technical evolution of Console's most complex cross-cutting systems, including permission and access control infrastructure, navigation and entitlements architecture, and the migration path from implicit to contract-tested service interfaces.
• Partner with engineering managers and product leads across product verticals to align on platform capability roadmaps, ensuring Console's architecture enables rather than constrains their delivery.
• Set and maintain the engineering quality bar for Console's platform, defining and championing DORA metric targets, contract testing standards, feature flag practices, and progressive migration patterns across the team.
• Mentor and develop engineers across Console sub-teams, providing architectural guidance, conducting design reviews, and raising the team's collective technical ceiling.

Qualities we look for:

• Demonstrated ownership of cross-team platform or shared-infrastructure systems, with architectural decisions that other engineering teams depended on and adopted.
• Strong full-stack web engineering depth spanning frontend and backend, and the ability to reason about integration contracts and system-level trade-offs across distributed web architectures.
• A track record of achieving technical alignment across teams without line management authority, through written proposals, structured facilitation, and clear articulation of trade-offs.
• Experience building or governing access control, permissions, or identity systems in an enterprise SaaS context, including an understanding of the commercial and security implications of these decisions.
• Comfort operating in genuinely ambiguous ownership spaces: identifying where architectural authority sits, stepping into gaps, and establishing clarity through documentation and shared standards.
• Evidence of force multiplication, measurably improving the engineering capability of the people around you through mentorship, standards-setting, or architectural work that reduces others' complexity.

What we offer:

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities.
• Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week.
• Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role.
• Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team.
• Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about.
• 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind.
• Competitive benefits: we've crafted it to reflect the diversity of our team and tailored it to align with your unique location.

If this role and our mission resonate with you, but you're hesitant because you don't check all the boxes, don't let that hold you back. At DeepL, it's all about the value you bring and the growth we can foster together.

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are - we appreciate authenticity here.