Engineer - Software Engineering

Location: London (office-based, ~4 days per week)

native has been building for ten years and still runs like a startup: small, fast, and unsentimental about how things get done. We run a managed marketplace that connects students, Students' Unions, universities and advertisers. We increase student engagement, we help Students' Unions fund themselves properly, and we give advertisers a measurable route to a student audience. We're looking for graduates who want to do real work immediately, learn at speed, and grow into something bigger.

Intellectual sharpness and structured thinking turn up often in engineering, maths, computer science, philosophy, languages or history, but not always, and not only there. The work runs from the pipelines that move and model our data to the applications that put it in front of people. The mix of software engineering, data engineering, data science and analysis shifts week to week, and we expect you to move between all four.

• Shipping production Python services in FastAPI, internal tools and dashboards, and front-end work in Jinja, Tailwind and React, across Heroku and AWS.
• Building and maintaining data pipelines in dbt and BigQuery.
• The models behind our student personas: clustering and scoring students on their interaction data, labelling it (sometimes with LLMs), and turning noisy signals into something commercially useful.
• Applying our pseudonymisation and data minimisation practices as you build.

This is not a perk and not a line about being comfortable with AI. It's how an engineer here ships in an afternoon what used to take a week. If that sounds like more work than writing it yourself, sometimes it is. You've excelled at something, and we're not precious about the form: first-class honours, a Dean's List, a research result, a project you couldn't leave alone.

You write proper Python, not only notebook Python. At home exploring data with pandas and numpy, equally at home writing a small service someone else can run without you in the room. You write SQL with intent. Not just queries that return the right rows, but ones that stay clear when the data's messier than the example.

You've worked with real, messy data: designing a schema, cleaning a dataset that fought back, checking your results are actually true. Coursework, Kaggle, a personal project, wherever.

• Data side: Software side: git, a web framework, getting something live on the cloud.

Bonus points if you've built and shipped something end to end that other people used. This is a six-month engagement, and we mean it as a proving ground for a permanent hire, not an internship and not a rotation. Do well and you move into a promoted, permanent role at the end of it.

You drop into live production from week one with real ownership, and the breadth is the point: in six months you'll have shipped across software, data and ML. You'll work from our London office at least four days a week, with one optional day remote. We're building an equitable environment where everyone at native can do the best work of their lives. Diversity and inclusion sit at the centre of that, and we put real support behind helping all of our people grow here.