London-Based Full-Stack Engineer: Build AI-Driven Solutions

About the role

We are seeking high-performing London-based engineers of any level to help us solve more of our customers’ problems. We are looking for folks who are excited about designing elegant technical solutions and shipping great code frequently. If you are looking for a fresh challenge at a fast-growing AI startup - we would love to hear from you!

What You’ll Do

• This is a hands-on (‘individual contributor’) role focused on building product that will solve our customers’ problems, including specifically:
• Designing, building and maintaining backend services and APIs
• Designing and building new UI/web components
• Developing new integrations to third party services and AI models
• Help triage bugs, investigate production incidents, and contribute to postmortems and root cause analysis
• Participating in code reviews, collaborating across technical and non-technical teams and stakeholders

What We’re Looking For

• Our ideal hire will:
• Enjoy actually building and making an impact: you get a kick out of shipping code frequently, iteratively, and collaboratively. You value MVPs and customer impact over perfectly engineered systems. You can take responsibility over the end-to-end deployment of what you build.
• Thrive at solving tough technical problems: you enjoy breaking down challenges into simple and well-designed solutions. You are fact-oriented and thoughtful in your approach, but you don’t get bogged down in over-intellectualizing or over-complicating things.
• Scale-oriented: while having a bias to action and impact, you will care about scalable infrastructure and engineering processes. Even better if you’re able to bring some better practices or improvements to our infrastructure or ways of working!
• Be able to contribute in our stack: we try to balance speed and impact with fitting the best framework/technology to the task at hand. Currently, we work primarily in Python / Flask / FastAPI on the backend, Terraform / GCP / AWS for infra, and React / JavaScript / TypeScript / Vercel on the frontend. Ideally, you’ll be able to contribute within our stack while also helping us experiment and evolve to continually improve functionality and performance.

Above all else, we value people who want to make an impact in their work. Here are some of the behaviours that we expect of all Herons:

• Scrappy and creative: when faced with an obstacle, you will either overcome it by pure determination (i.e., by hand), or find an unconventional approach or ‘hack’ to navigate it.
• Persistent: you may not always find the right answer or person immediately, but you're motivated to keep on trying until you do so. You’ll go the extra mile if that’s what it takes.
• Pilot not passenger: at a fast-growing company like Heron we need people who jump on opportunities unprompted and drive them to a great outcome, rather than folks who wait to be told what to do.
• Excited to work in a fast-paced, high-growth, team-based environment: we aim to move quickly and decisively, but together. You’ll be a great team player and do what it takes for the team to succeed.

What You Can Expect as a Heron

• Competitive compensation, including equity
• Based full-time in London, where most of the team is in-person multiple days per week
• Your choice of top-of-the-line equipment to fit out your desk in the office
• Occasional travel to NYC for retreats and to work with the team there
• Competitive benefits: health insurance; pension; uncapped annual leave; parental leave
• Free mental health support via Spill - on-demand access to therapy
• Weekly company lunches (always inclusive and vegan-friendly)
• Applicants from any background and gender are welcome and we have a zero tolerance policy on discrimination

About the interview

• Initial conversation (20 minutes) - conversation to discuss what you're looking for, what Heron offers, and to see if there's a good fit.
• Technical interview (up to 60 minutes) - interactive technical session with one or two of our engineers where you will review a pull request and then do some live coding to build on it.
• Team interviews (2-3 hours in total) - mix of technical and behavioral conversations with Heron teammates and founders. You'll get a feel for the people you'll work with and how we approach problems, and we'll get to know how you collaborate, communicate, and think.
• References - 2 references from people you've worked with who can speak to your impact, working style, and contributions in a professional setting.

About Heron Data

We are Heron Data, a Series A stage company based in New York and London. At Heron, we use the latest advances in AI and LLMs to automate document processing. Our software handles emails, analyses attachments, and takes actions like updating CRMs or requesting more info to execute workflows end-to-end for our customers. We serve a range of businesses including some of the world's largest fintechs, banks and other specialty finance companies, commercial insurers, and more.

Our largest product automates underwriting for small business lenders and other specialty finance companies. We eliminate cumbersome manual processes and enable our customers to provide their services with much greater speed, precision, and fairness.

We are a rapidly growing company with over 150 customers in financial services and beyond who trust us to be embedded in critical processes - without us, their businesses stop. We analyse tens of thousands of documents a day, including over 20 million individual bank transactions daily for our customers. We continue to grow into more segments and workflows: further into lending, banking, insurance. And we think there's much more we can do!

We are a lean, scrappy and committed team with a flat structure and collaborative culture. Our team brings together a wealth of experience from great tech companies including Facebook, Spotify, Revolut and many other startups from around the world.

With team members from five different continents, we embrace multiculturalism and diversity. From company events to everyday interactions, we make sure everyone feels welcome and accommodate all cultural and dietary requirements.

Since our launch in September 2020, at the end of the S20 batch, we've experienced a lot of growth! Today, we serve over 150 customers.