Junior Software Developer / Graduate in Edinburgh

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a junior developer role that isn’t a glorified internship. We’re Soar Tech. We build cloud-based banking software for credit unions and community lenders across the UK. Credit unions are community-owned financial organisations that exist to help their members rather than make money for shareholders. Our platform is the technology that helps them do that.

We’re a small team in Scotland, and we don’t have the luxury of specialising. That means no graduate programme, no six months of watching other people code, no being the person who gets the tickets nobody else wants. You’d be writing production code from your first week, and the things you build would be used by real people in real communities.

If that sounds terrifying, that’s normal. If it also sounds exciting, you might be exactly who we’re looking for.

What you’d actually be doing

• Building features in Node.js and React/Next.js
• Writing and debugging MongoDB queries
• Helping figure out why something isn’t working on AWS
• Picking up a client support query and working through it
• Asking a lot of questions (seriously, this is encouraged)
• Using Claude Code to build things faster than you thought possible, then learning to spot when it’s confidently wrong

We won’t throw you in the deep end without support. But we will expect you to be curious, self-motivated, and willing to get stuck in. The learning curve is steep, and that’s actually the point.

How we build things

This is the bit that might surprise you. We’ve fully embraced AI-assisted development. Claude Code is a core part of how we work every day. We use it to write code, debug problems, understand unfamiliar systems, and move faster than a team our size has any right to.

If you’re already using AI tools in your personal projects or university work, and you’ve developed a sense for how to use them well (and when not to trust them), that’s a genuine advantage here. We care less about how many years of experience you have and more about how you think and how quickly you learn.

The stack (don’t worry if you don’t know all of it)

• Node.js and TypeScript
• React and Next.js
• MongoDB Atlas
• AWS (EC2, S3, CloudFront)
• Claude Code and AI-assisted development tools
• ISO 27001:2022 compliance (we’ll teach you about this)

What we’re looking for

• A solid foundation in TypeScript. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be comfortable reading and writing it.
• Some experience building things that actually work. Personal projects, university work, open source contributions, freelance work. We care more about what you’ve built than which university you went to.
• Genuine curiosity about how things work under the hood. If something breaks, your instinct should be to figure out why, not just to try something else.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. If you’re already using Claude, Cursor, Copilot or similar tools and you’re excited about where this is all heading, that’s a strong signal.
• Good communication. You’ll be talking to the rest of the team constantly, and sometimes to clients. Being able to explain what you’re doing (and what you don’t understand) matters.
• The confidence to ask for help and the self-motivation to try things on your own first.

What’s in it for you

• £28,000 – £38,000 depending on experience and ability
• Remote working, Scotland-based (Glasgow or Edinburgh preferred for occasional in-person days)
• 33 days’ annual leave inclusive of public holidays, plus a day off for your birthday
• Private medical insurance
• Opportunities to attend conferences and industry events. For a junior role, this kind of exposure is rare and genuinely valuable for your development.
• The kind of accelerated learning you genuinely cannot get at a larger company. You’ll grow faster here in a year than you would in three years at a big firm, because everyone on the team has real ownership of what they build.

And finally

This role has a lot of upside, but we want to be straight with you about the realities. We’re a small team. Support is part of the job. The infrastructure is complex. There will be days where you feel out of your depth.

But there will also be days where you ship a feature that immediately helps a credit union serve its members better. Days where you solve something nobody else could figure out. And days where you realise you’ve learned more in a month than you expected to learn in a year.

If you’re the sort of person who thrives on that kind of challenge, we’d genuinely love to hear from you.