Senior Engineer & Tech Lead – Scale-Up Platform (Hybrid)

Salary: £135k to £150k

Equity: 0.35% to 0.4%

Location: Shoreditch, London

In person/remote: 4x/week in-person; hours flexible but typically 09:30-18:30

Benefits: free therapy, 30 days holiday + bank holidays + day off for birthday + 3 day company shutdown over Xmas, company paid lunch twice a week

The job: making high quality mental health support more accessible

About the company: Spill’s mission is to reduce unnecessary emotional pain by making high quality mental health support easily accessible. Our product is bought by businesses and their employees can book free therapy sessions (we recently delivered our 100,000th free session). We are bought by companies in industries ranging from tech and media to hospitality and construction. On the company itself, we operate with an intentionally small HQ team of 8 full-time employees (3 software engineers). Despite the small headcount, our goals for the coming years are punchy - hopefully we aren’t waiting too long for our millionth free session - and we are really serious about achieving them.

About the role: Before explaining the specific responsibilities of this role, it’s worth stating that this role is going to have real responsibility at Spill. Spill is in the process of going from a company that’s searching for product market fit to a company that’s in the scaling phase. You’ll be joining as the most senior engineer in the team and have the remit to improve the processes and systems that we use to build software for our clients, users and counsellors.

What this role will actually do: When you join, you will be part of a 3 person engineering team. You will work cross functionally on projects with design, product, clinical, sales, marketing and operations. Calvin, Spill’s founder, or Harry, Spill’s VP Ops, is the most likely person to be the PM (i.e. the person shaping the goals and scope of the work) on projects you work on. However, for some projects, you may also take on that role. 50% of your time will be spent on building our product and internal tools and 50% of your time will be spent on the layer above - to improve efficiencies across multiple products and tools at once.

• Build a tool for Spill’s clinical team to efficiently triage messages for safeguarding concerns
• Set up a lightweight data lake with data from our CRM, billing system and database to automate monthly reporting
• Add traceability from sessions used to sessions paid for to speed up our billing processes

What this role likely won’t do: As we scale our service over the next few years, we won’t need to solve any super challenging load or scaling challenges on our backend engineering systems. Most of the gnarly problems we will be facing will be business and product problems that will require us to be inventive with the software solutions we build, it won’t be working out how to handle millions of requests per minute. Additionally, because we generally hire senior+ people for our roles, there isn’t the typical team dynamic problems you get in startups. This role won’t need to have any management responsibility in the short-medium term to have a big impact and we have the option of hiring an external engineering manager further down the line if you aren’t interested in the manager path for your career.

Our tech stack: NodeJS, TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, AWS, GitHub Actions, Pulumi. Note that we don’t require any previous experience working with this tech stack for the role and we are language agnostic during the hiring process.

Requirements:

• You’ve got a good grasp of computer science fundamentals - either from a computer science degree or experience.
• You have 9+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• You have 3+ years of working within a scale-up technology company on a high-performing team.
• You have successfully worn the tech lead hat within your company for multiple projects.
• If you are comfortable with devops, that’s a plus.

That said, we recognise that experience will vary a lot between people, so please don’t be put off if you don’t meet these criteria exactly. We care about outcomes rather than tickbox criteria, and it’s often the case that the perfect person for the role has a CV that looks a little different. Research (by Harvard University) shows that women are particularly likely to second-guess themselves and not apply - so if you’re worried you don’t meet all the criteria, get in touch anyhow and let us do the worrying.