Staff Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure & AI) in London

Moving home is stressful, and it comes with a maze of admin: energy, broadband, water, insurance, council tax and more.

Just Move In takes all of that off people's plates.

We are a B2B2C platform: estate agent partners refer movers to us, we help those movers (and a growing base of direct customers) set up everything for their new home, and we earn commission from the suppliers we connect them to.

It is a real, revenue-generating product with partners and customers relying on it every day.

Our ambition is to be the one-stop solution for everything to do with moving and move management: before, during and after the move.

That means helping people plan the move, notifying everyone who needs to know along the way, and then handling what comes next, from household expenses to communication with landlords and agencies.

Jay, our AI moving assistant, is how we make that an agentic, end-to-end experience.

The role

We are hiring a Staff Engineer to bring our AI moving assistant and our core backend together into one fast, reliable, scalable and global platform, and to set the engineering standards the whole team builds on.

Jay, our AI assistant, runs as its own Python service; our core runs on Laravel and AWS.

You would own unifying the two, lead the work that keeps the platform fast and reliable as we grow and take on more of the move, and raise the bar on how we build.

We are a small, senior, AI-native team, so this is a high-ownership role where your decisions ship and your standards stick.

It maps to the Staff level in our published career framework: a multiplier for any team you work with, owning ambiguous problems and changing how engineering operates through better patterns, tooling and abstractions.

What you will do

• Unify Jay (a Python service, built on Fast API and pydantic-ai) and our Laravel 11 core into one fast, reliable platform, so our agentic product and the systems behind it work as one.
• Build and own complex work across our Laravel core: domain logic, data integrity, jobs and queues, and supplier and partner integrations, on code that real revenue depends on.
• Take the platform's reliability, performance and scalability as your domain.

This covers the database (Aurora My SQL), the queue and cache layer (Redis and Horizon), observability and alerting (Datadog, Sentry), CI/CD, and the move toward more resilient, managed and globally scalable infrastructure as our scope and customer base grow.

• Design systems that fail gracefully, lead incident response, and remove single points of failure before they cause problems.
• Set the engineering standards a growing team builds on: architecture and patterns, a code review culture that teaches, testing, and documentation that outlives any one person.
• Work AI-native: use AI coding agents (we run Claude Code) as a core part of your workflow, build automation that makes the whole team faster, and help shape both Alan, our in-house AI engineer, and the agentic product we are building around Jay.
• What we are looking for
• Senior or staff-level backend experience with deep Laravel and PHP: Eloquent, queues and Horizon, migrations, and a strong testing habit (Pest or PHPUnit).
• A real track record with production infrastructure and scaling on AWS: relational databases at scale (Aurora, RDS, My SQL), Redis or Elasti Cache, caching and queue tuning, observability (Datadog, Sentry or similar) and CI/CD.
• Experience scaling and hardening systems: incident response, sensible alerting, and services designed to fail gracefully.
• A habit of raising the bar wherever you land, introducing standards, patterns and review culture, and writing documentation others rely on.
• AI-native ways of working: you already use AI coding agents (Claude Code or similar) as a primary tool and review their output with strong technical judgment.
• You handle ambiguity well, communicate clearly at every level, and make the people around you better.
• Comfort with Python. Our AI services, including Jay, are built in Python (Fast API and pydantic-ai), and you would help bring them together with the PHP core.
• You have shipped production AI, agentic or LLM systems: RAG, agents, tool-calling or evals (a bonus if it involved pydantic-ai).
• Serious My SQL performance tuning at scale.
• Infrastructure-as-code, Dev Ops or SRE depth: Terraform, and running AWS as a system, ideally across multiple regions.
• You have taken a product through significant growth, or scaled one globally.
• Comfortable enough across the stack to reason about our frontends (Next. js, Nuxt, Vue).
• Our stack

Laravel 11 (PHP), Aurora My SQL, Redis, Horizon, Pest and PHPUnit, AWS (London), EC2 and RDS, Datadog, Sentry, Git Hub Actions and Tailscale.

Jay and our AI services run on Python, Fast API and pydantic-ai, with Claude Code and agentic workflows woven through how we build, and Next. js 15, Nuxt 3 and Vue on the frontend.

• How we work and what we offer
• An AI-native engineering team that builds on AI tooling rather than just allowing it, building an agentic product on top, with a clear vision (Alan and Jay) for where both go.
• Real ownership and autonomy in a small, senior, high-trust team.
• A clear, published career framework. You would join at Staff (P4), with a transparent path onward.
• High standards alongside psychological safety: direct feedback, blameless incidents, and room to take risks.
• Hybrid working in London, with competitive compensation based on experience.
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