Senior software engineer (Back-end)

Hybrid role to be based in our London, Bath or Edinburgh office

About us

Seccl is the Octopus-owned embedded investment platform that’s on a mission to helping more people to invest – and invest well.

We’re B-Corp certified with an amazing product-market fit, impressive early traction and the potential to transform an outdated industry, for the better. We\’ve been growing fast and will scale even faster over the next few years.

We’re also proud to be part of Octopus, the £multi billion group that\’s on a mission to breathe new life into broken industries, through companies like Octopus Energy, Octopus Investments and Octopus Money.

Check out the Seccl website for the latest on our products and our mission to shape the future of investments.

Our culture

Never settle – We think of ourselves as ‘embedded hero-makers’ for our customers. We put them first, and if we say we’ll do something, we’ll move heaven and earth to do it. We think boldly and embrace change.

Take ownership – We think rigorously and deeply about a problem, but then charge at it, acting with and urgency and speed that sets us apart. But we never lose sight of quality or long-term scalability.

Be generous & candid – We encourage our people – and our customers – to challenge us and never shy away from tough conversations. We have a flat and inclusive culture where everyone can be themselves – and speak up.

Check out our Glassdoor page for the latest reviews or our LinkedIn for company updates and insights from the team.

Our engineering

• Our API design concepts.

• Our product and engineering department is split into four tribes: Custody; Accounts; Customer Enablement; and Cloud. Each tribe is comprised of multiple teams, each owning a specific domain of the product. Each team will have a squad engineering manager, a product manager and 3-5 engineers with tailored skillsets to the specific domain.

• Our current technology stack is AWS serverless products (Lambda , SQS , EventBridge , API Gateway , S3 ) running Typescript on the compute layer and backed by MongoDB for the database layer. We have some C# services and are expanding out into other AWS products such as ECS Fargate . Our IAC is a mix of Serverless framework and Terraform . We use JIRA for project management, Github actions for our CI/CD pipelines and Incident.io for our incident management process.

• For more detailed information, feel free to ask for our tech radar and engineering practices.

The role

The purpose of this role is to design, build and operate reliable and scalable software solutions, building new functionality using Typescript and Node.js. You play a key role in our software development and have a hands-on approach throughout the development process. As a senior member of the team, you are the ‘go-to’ person for queries.

On a typical day you will…

• Work collaboratively in a domain aligned cross-functional squad made up of engineers and product along with colleagues from customer-facing and operations teams.

• Design, implement and operate your services within your domain.

• Be accountable for the SLAs of your products and iterative improvements.

• Maintain and extend documentation for your services.

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and technical excellence while understanding when “good enough for now” is appropriate.

• Provide guidance and mentorship for more junior engineers.

• Communicate with non-technical colleagues to answer queries about the Seccl system.

What you need…

• To own your services from design to operation. We operate a build-and-run model where engineers have autonomy but full accountability.

• Engineers are not passengers in their products but champions. Drive improvements and features while being comfortable to openly collaborate and investigate ideas and being challenged.

• Have a strong ability to understand business requirements and turn this into efficient, scalable solutions. Desire to learn our business domain.

• Experience in a strongly/statically typed language.

• Have a strong understanding of designing, building, and running high-quality, standards-compliant workflow APIs, with a focus on testing, observability, and performance.

• Have worked with a cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP).

• Have worked with distributed systems and are comfortable debugging through tracing and observability.

• Willing to be on-call for your services.

Nice to have…

• Have experience with Node.js , specifically Typescript .

• Have experience with Amazon Web Services .

• Have experience with serverless products.

• Have experience with document databases, specifically MongoDB .

• Have experience mentoring/managing.

• Have experience in a build-and-run model.

• Have experience in a structured on-call process.

• Previous experience working in regulated industries, particularly finance.

What’s in it for you…

We offer a generous mix of benefits for the things that really matter to our people, including:

A salary between £75,000 and £90,000 – dependant on experience + reviewed annually

27 days holiday + bank holidays (some can be flexible) + day off on your birthday + three days (full time) per year for Dependant leave

Two volunteering days per year

Length of service award – one month paid sabbatical at eight years

6% employer pension contribution, and life assurance

Private medical insurance with AXA Health

Enhanced Parental leave

MacBook and up to £500 home office set up budget

£750 per person learning budget

Option to work abroad for up to six weeks a year

Health and wellbeing initiatives including free therapy via Wellness Cloud, mental health support via Headspace

Strong financial wellbeing focus including access to Octopus Money , Octopus Share Incentive Plan and will writing offering via Octopus Legacy

Perkbox – Flexi-points giving you a range of discounts and perks including free weekly coffee, gym and retail discounts

Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work and Octopus Electric Vehicle Leasing

Interview process

Interviewing is a two-way thing, and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you. Our interviews are conversational, so come with questions and be curious. In general, you can expect the interview process to look a bit like this, (following an initial chat with one of our Talent team):

• First stage – one-hour system design interview with two of our senior+ engineers

• Small take home task, 1-2 hours (feel free to use AI)

• Second stage – one-hour technical debrief of the take home task and questions about previous engineering experience.

• Final stage – 45 mins bar-raiser culture-based interview

We’ll only close this role once we have enough applications for the next stage. Please submit your application as soon as possible to make sure you don’t miss out and you should expect to hear back from us within one to two weeks of applying.

Our aim is to build a diverse and inclusive company of awesome people, with unique skills, passions and experiences. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.

If this sounds like your kind of thing, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t tick every box. We’d love to hear from you!

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