Senior/Staff Software Engineer in Birtley

Engineering at Fonoa plays a very central part in the business. As a company with ambitions to be a world‑class API solution for all things tax, we value quality over quantity when building, and we care about creating scalable and maintainable software that our customers and daily users can rely on.

Engineering Culture

Engineers are given customer problems to solve rather than features to build. We understand the customer's needs before considering implementation details. Engineers are owners of their past, present and future: architecture, tools, coding, testing, deployment, operations and scaling. We work in lean, small teams. We co‑own the product roadmap with product managers. We choose collaboration, compassion and trust over individualism and politics. We prefer innovation, constant iteration and trust over competition and perfect solutions. We support each other, are kind by nature, and give as much feedback to improve as professionals. We break down complex problems and consistently seek to find the most straightforward solutions. We take quality seriously and factor it into everything we do. We are comfortable with change, either in priorities, goals and deadlines. We see this more as an opportunity than a hurdle. We are not satisfied with the status quo and push for change. We seek those looking to make a severe impact and are excited about working in a high‑growth startup. We ship fast, continuously and iteratively, learning each step. We are data‑informed and are ok with finding the data when it’s missing.

Our Products

We have a suite of API products that automate tax‑related workflows for any internet company: Lookup, Tax, Returns, Data sharing and E‑Invoicing. We may discover novel customer needs as we learn and spin up new products as required.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Node and Go
• Frontend: ReactJS and Typescript
• Persistence: PostgreSQL
• Cloud Services: Azure and GCP
• Infrastructure: Terraform, Kubernetes CRDs, ArgoCD and DataDog

What you will do

• Learn about how painful it is for companies to handle tax manually, and think about how our products are changing the status quo.
• Own what you build, with the ability to decide how to make it and the responsibility of operating it in the production environment.
• Build meaningful products with REST APIs that customers use and depend on for everyday business (finance, operation, tax and developer teams).
• Build new product features across the stack, from back‑end business logic implementation to front‑end customer‑facing interfaces.
• Write high‑quality, robust, modular code for frontend and backend.
• Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs as well as internal applications capabilities.
• Record and collate lots and lots of data sets from all these operations for long‑term storage and future insight.
• Use every learning and observation to improve our products, constantly.
• Understand customer needs and the pain they are experiencing related to tax automation.
• Understand competitive products.

Qualifications

• Fully proficient in English, written and spoken.
• Strong sense of ownership, care about what you build, and do the right thing that serves customers.
• Builder at heart; enjoy exposure, making things work for a company long term, and having an entrepreneurial attitude toward anything that comes your way.
• Eager to learn or comfortable scaling and operating large‑scale microservices in high‑growth environments.
• Proficient in a couple of languages; most of our codebase is in node.js with Typescript and Go on the backend. We use ReactJS on the front end, but we see them as a means to an end.
• Keep code tidy and clean, with tests, no undelivered features and no dead code in production.
• Ship fast, continuously and iteratively, learning each step.
• Use data over opinions to make decisions, and are ok with finding the data yourself when it’s missing.
• Comfortable with change, either in priorities, goals and deadlines; see it as an opportunity rather than a hurdle.
• Satisfied with challenging the status quo and pushing for change.
• Want to make a severe impact and are excited about working in a high‑growth startup.

Additional Information

Note: If you feel you don’t have the whole experience we’re looking for but feel you could be a bit fit and are willing to learn, do apply anyway! We are trying to build a diverse and inclusive team.