Staff Software Engineer in Leeds

About the Team

At Smoothwall by Qoria, the Ingress and Integrations team builds the entry point through which every safeguarding signal from schools reaches our platform. They design and operate high‑performance pipelines that ingest over 1.3 billion captures every month from millions of devices, transform and route them securely, and leverage AI technologies to denoise the data so that only the highest risk alerts are escalated to the human moderation team. This team sits at the centre of our technology ecosystem, solving complex problems in scalability, reliability, security and event architecture. Their work directly enables schools and safety professionals to protect children by giving them timely and trusted insight when something is wrong. Joining this team means working on systems that have measurable social impact at a scale where technical excellence truly matters.

Role level and growth

Our Staff Engineers are instrumental in tackling complex technical challenges that shape the future of our platform. Operating with high autonomy, they lead by example, apply strong engineering judgement, and influence outcomes across teams. They are trusted to architect resilient systems, drive strategic decisions, and raise the technical bar through coaching and thought leadership. Their impact is not confined to delivery; they play a key role in defining how we build, scale and innovate.

Required Technical Skills

• Go for backend development with proven experience at an advanced commercial level (non‑negotiable)
• Demonstrable Event driven architecture and distributed system design
• Cloud platforms, ideally GCP, although strong experience with AWS or Azure will be considered
• Advanced SQL knowledge and experience working with large datasets
• Experience building and operating highly scalable and highly available systems
• Solid understanding of CI/CD practices and Kubernetes management
• Terraform

Bonus Skills

• Experience operating or integrating ML models, ideally using GCP Vertex AI
• Typescript for frontend work with hands‑on commercial experience (we use React)
• Automation testing to help QA engineers focus on coverage rather than manual validation
• GCP Build, GCP Deploy
• DataDog
• .Net Core

What We Value in a Candidate

• Critical Thinking: Ability to approach complex challenges with a structured and thoughtful mindset.
• Problem Solving: A knack for finding effective, innovative solutions to technical and product challenges.
• Attention to Detail: A meticulous approach to crafting high‑quality, reliable software.
• Simplicity and Efficiency: Good looks like simple & maintainable software.
• Pragmatic Excellence: Striking the right balance between technical rigour, passion for innovation, and pragmatism to deliver exceptional products that support our customers.
• Curiosity: The drive to learn, to probe further and to understand more.

Why choose Smoothwall by Qoria?

In this role, you can expect:

• Employee Share Scheme
• Generous leave Allowance
• And much more

More importantly, you’ll:

• Deliver tech with purpose... You’ll draw on your exceptional product design skills and breadth of experience to ensure we stay ahead of the game when it comes to cyber safety technology. As part of our products team, your work will be at the very heart of our mission: to ensure safe and secure online environments for children.
• With people who care... You’ll work among a team of creative, hard‑working and flexible professionals who share your drive and passion for what we do. With constantly shifting projects and deadlines, we pull together to expertly navigate the challenges of project management. Our product team’s mantra? Prioritisation. This includes being able to say no when the time comes. We all take ownership of our work, end to end. And at the same time, we really care about growing and winning together.
• Through work that you love… The world of cybersafety moves quickly. So we do too. Our product team members say no two days are alike. Using proven frameworks, you’ll draw on customer/client feedback to develop new, exciting features. You’ll lead and participate in product development and release roadmaps via SCRUM. You’ll run trials and MVPs before educating internal and external audiences on how to get the most out of new features. Developing cyber safety tech is an exciting, important challenge.
• And a career that you own… At Qoria, we’re accustomed to bringing people up through our product development ranks. You’ll be supported to master all aspects of your role including coordination of the product development lifecycle, team management, public speaking and product launches. With a tried and tested path ahead, you’ll clearly see where a career with us can take you. And you’ll grab the opportunity to grow with us.

We’d love to hear from you. Please submit your application if you would like to be considered for this opportunity. At this stage we are only accepting applications from those with full working rights in the UK.