Senior Software Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our engineering team and take a lead role in designing, building, and evolving our online systems and services. You will work closely with the product team to translate ideas and rapid prototypes into well-considered technical plans, then drive your team to deliver and iterate at pace. This is a hands‑on role with real influence. You will architect scalable APIs and services, make pragmatic decisions about data storage, mentor the engineers around you, and play a key part in shaping our engineering culture.

What you'll do:

• Design, build, and maintain highly scalable web services, APIs, and backend systems that handle real‑world production load with reliability and performance.
• Collaborate directly with the product team to evaluate ideas and rapid prototypes, proposing clear technical plans that balance ambition with pragmatism.
• Lead and drive the engineering team through delivery, from sprint planning and technical design through to deployment and post‑release iteration.
• Architect and review solutions across the full stack, ensuring consistency in patterns, quality, and long‑term maintainability.
• Define and uphold engineering standards including code review, testing strategy, CI/CD pipelines, and observability practices.
• Partner with product on rapid iteration cycles, keeping feedback loops short, reducing time‑to‑learn, and enabling the team to move with confidence.
• Proactively identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and reliability risks before they become problems.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and be a meaningful voice in engineering‑wide discussions around direction, tooling, and process.
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical problems, providing clear thinking and solutions under pressure.
• Champion a culture of psychological safety, continuous learning, and high engineering craft within the team.

What you'll need to succeed:

Essential requirements:

• Significant hands‑on experience building and operating highly scalable online systems and services in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in designing and building RESTful APIs and microservices architectures — with a deep understanding of trade‑offs in distributed systems.
• Solid experience with multiple data storage paradigms: relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL (e.g. MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis), and the patterns that make each appropriate in context.
• Proven ability to coach and mentor junior and mid‑level engineers through code reviews, pair programming, technical guidance, and constructive feedback.
• Experience translating ambiguous product ideas or early prototypes into structured technical proposals and delivery plans.
• Demonstrated ability to lead an engineering team through a full delivery cycle — from technical design to release — while maintaining momentum and quality.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, system design, testing, and operational concerns (monitoring, alerting, incident response).
• Experience working in an agile, fast‑paced product environment with short iteration cycles and close collaboration between engineering and product teams.
• Excellent communication skills — able to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• A track record of pragmatic, outcome‑focused decision‑making: balancing technical rigour with the need to ship and learn quickly.

Desirable requirements:

• Experience designing and consuming gRPC services, including protocol buffer schema design and inter‑service communication patterns.
• Familiarity with event‑driven architectures and messaging systems (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS).
• Experience with cloud‑native infrastructure and deployment patterns (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including serverless, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), and infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Exposure to stream processing or real‑time data pipelines at scale.
• Experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
• Prior experience in a tech lead or staff engineer capacity, with involvement in cross‑team technical decision making.
• Contribution to open‑source projects, engineering blog posts, or technical community involvement.
• Familiarity with product analytics, feature flagging, and experimentation frameworks to support rapid iteration.
• Experience with security‑by‑design principles and implementing secure coding practices across distributed systems.

Your approach to work:

The role is as much about how you work as what you build. We are looking for someone who:

• Takes ownership without being territorial — you share knowledge freely, help others grow, and care about the success of the whole team, not just your own work.
• Brings clarity to ambiguity — you are comfortable working from a rough idea or prototype and can structure thinking around it without needing a perfect brief.
• Balances speed and quality deliberately — you understand when to move fast and when to slow down, and can make that call with sound reasoning.
• Communicates proactively — you surface blockers early, share progress openly, and keep both your engineering team and product stakeholders informed without being prompted.

Important to know:

Location: We have offices in various UK locations and you will be expected to attend one of the offices at least 3 days per week: Farringdon, London; Cwmbran, Wales; Haddenham.

Right to Work: Applicants must already hold a legal right to work in the UK without time restrictions and without the need for future sponsorship. We are unable to provide Skilled Worker visa sponsorship.