Staff Software Engineer – Platform & Core Systems

Multiverse is the upskilling platform for AI and Tech adoption. We have partnered with 1,500+ companies to deliver a new kind of learning that’s transforming today’s workforce. Our upskilling apprenticeships are designed for people of any age and career stage to build critical AI, data, and tech skills. Our learners have driven $2bn+ ROI for their employers, using the skills they’ve learned to improve productivity and measurable performance.

In June 2022, we announced a $220 million Series D funding round co-led by StepStone Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst. With a post-money valuation of $1.7bn, the round makes us the UK’s first EdTech unicorn. But we aren’t stopping there. With a strong operational footprint and 800+ employees, we have ambitious plans to continue scaling. We’re building a world where tech skills unlock people’s potential and output. Join Multiverse and power our mission to equip the workforce to win in the AI era.

The Opportunity: As a Staff Software Engineer in Tech Foundation, you’ll be a technical leader and a force multiplier - tackling complex challenges that cut across our core systems. You’ll focus on modernizing and refactoring our foundational domains, ensuring our core services are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with our long-term architecture vision. You’ll play a key role in evolving our internal developer platform and enhancing the overall developer experience at Multiverse.

Our team builds and maintains the core systems and shared services that every engineer relies on to ship stable, scalable, and efficient products. We provide standardized infrastructure and modern platforms that enable teams to move fast — while maintaining the flexibility to innovate.

To thrive in this role, you’ll bring a passion for improving developer experience, deep technical insight, and a collaborative mindset. You’ll help shape our core architecture, refactor key domains, and design scalable systems that reduce friction, integrate AI-augmented workflows, and make development at Multiverse faster, more reliable, and more enjoyable.

What You’ll Do:

• Architect & Build Foundational Systems: Combine software engineering practices with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and observability to deliver solutions ranging from infrastructure abstraction to core services used across the company.
• Refactor for Scalability & Maintainability: Identify areas of technical debt or fragile architecture and lead refactoring initiatives to simplify complex code, improve performance, and enable faster iteration. Continuously enhance the design of core systems to support evolving business needs without introducing unnecessary complexity.
• Define and Drive Technical Strategy: Partner with engineering and product leadership to define the long-term technical roadmap, making critical decisions that will shape the developer experience for years to come.
• Solve Ambiguous, High-Impact Problems: Take the lead on our most complex technical challenges, navigating ambiguity to break down large-scale problems into clear, actionable plans for the team.
• Elevate the Engineering Bar: Act as a technical mentor and role model for other engineers. You will elevate the team’s capabilities through code reviews, design discussions, and by introducing and championing best practices.
• Lead Cross-Functional Initiatives: Drive technical alignment and influence outcomes across engineering, product, and design teams, ensuring we build cohesive and powerful solutions.
• Champion Innovation & Pragmatism: Explore, prototype, and advocate for new technologies (including experimenting with AI-powered automation to enhance how engineers write, test, and deploy code) while balancing speed of delivery with long-term sustainability.

About you:

• Proven Technical Leadership: A track record of architecting, building, and operating complex, scalable systems. Your experience goes beyond a single team to influencing broader technical domains.
• Expertise in Your Craft: Deep knowledge and proficiency across our stack (we use TypeScript, React, Python, Elixir, AWS) and the ability to choose the right tool for the job. Even if you have not worked with these, we would still love to chat.
• Strategic & Collaborative Partnership: You work effectively with peers, stakeholders, and leadership to make critical decisions and drive projects forward.
• Mentorship as a Multiplier: Experience formally or informally mentoring other senior engineers and a passion for helping others succeed and grow their skills.
• Pragmatic Problem-Solving: Empathy for developer workflows and productivity, while using data-driven insights to set priorities and measure impact.
• Passionate about AI: with hands-on experience or deep exposure to integrating LLMs, or intelligent assistants into developer workflows.
• Strong empathy for developer pain: capable of translating data and feedback into high-leverage solutions.

If this role excites you but your experience doesn’t perfectly align with every point, we’d still love to hear from you.

Benefits:

• Time off - 27 days holiday, plus 5 additional days off: 1 life event day, 2 volunteer days, 2 company-wide wellbeing days (M-Powered Weekend) and 8 bank holidays per year.
• Health & Wellness - private medical Insurance with Bupa, a medical cashback scheme, life insurance, gym membership & wellness resources through Wellhub and access to Spill - all in one mental health support.
• Hybrid work offering - for most roles we collaborate in the office three days per week with the exception of Coaches and Instructors who collaborate in the office once a month.
• Work-from-anywhere scheme - you’ll have the opportunity to work from anywhere, up to 10 days per year.
• Space to connect: Beyond the desk, we make time for weekly catch-ups, seasonal celebrations, and have a kitchen that’s always stocked!

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: We’re an equal opportunities employer. And proud of it. Every applicant and employee is afforded the same opportunities regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. This will never change.

Our Commitment to Safeguarding: Multiverse is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of our learners. We expect all employees to share this commitment and adhere to our Safeguarding Policy, our Prevent Policy and all other Multiverse company policies. Successful applicants will be required to undertake at least a Basic check via the Disclosure Barring Service (DBS). For roles that will involve a Regulated Activity, successful applicants must also undergo an Enhanced DBS check, including a Children’s Barred List check and a Prohibition Order check. Roles involving Regulated Activity may interact with vulnerable groups, therefore are exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 meaning applicants are required to declare any convictions, cautions, reprimands, and final warnings. Providing false information is an offence and could result in the application being rejected or summary dismissal if the applicant has been selected, and possible referral to the police and the DBS.