Product Engineer – London (Hybrid)

Salary: Competitive, dependent on experience

Role closes: 16th September, 2026

Please note on your application - Salary expectation, relevant rights to work in UK

About

VARA is an early-stage technology company currently operating in stealth. We are building a new B2B software platform around a significant and growing commercial problem.

The product combines sophisticated technology, data and AI with deep domain expertise, and is being developed in close partnership with customers.

We are a small, experienced multidisciplinary team spanning engineering, product, strategy and commercial leadership. We believe the best products are built when those disciplines work closely together, and our engineers have a meaningful voice in both how the product is built and how it evolves.

We are now looking for a Product Engineer to join us at an important stage of the company’s development.

The Role

We are looking for a capable and ambitious Product Engineer who enjoys solving a broad range of technical problems and wants to develop within a small, experienced engineering team.

This is a hands-on software engineering role. You will work directly with our Senior Engineer to design, build and continually improve the platform, while collaborating closely with product and other members of the founding team.

As an early engineering hire, you will work across different parts of the stack rather than being confined to a narrow specialism. Depending on the problem, that might mean building a customer-facing feature, designing an API, improving a data workflow, integrating an AI capability or strengthening the underlying architecture.

You should be comfortable discussing implementation details with engineers while also understanding the business and product requirements behind what you are building.

We are looking for someone who asks good questions, communicates clearly, takes ownership and is motivated by building technology that solves real problems.

What You’ll Do

As a Product Engineer, you will:

• Design, develop, test and maintain software across the platform.
• Build high-quality product features across the application stack.
• Work with AI and large language model technologies where they create meaningful product value.
• Contribute to data ingestion, scheduled processing and workflow orchestration.
• Build and maintain APIs and third-party integrations.
• Work closely with the Senior Engineer on technical solutions that are scalable, secure and maintainable.
• Collaborate with product colleagues to turn requirements and ideas into well-engineered software.
• Develop a strong understanding of the product and the principles behind it.
• Participate in code reviews, testing and the continuous improvement of our engineering practices.
• Take ownership of features and technical problems from definition through to production.
• Help improve the architecture, tooling and developer experience as the platform grows.
• Continuously broaden your technical capability and take on increasingly complex work.

About You

We are less interested in finding someone who has specialised narrowly in a particular framework and more interested in strong engineering fundamentals, judgement and curiosity. You are likely to:

• Have solid professional software engineering experience.
• Have a strong understanding of modern software development practices.
• Be comfortable learning unfamiliar technologies when a problem requires it.
• Enjoy working across different parts of a technology stack.
• Understand how software systems work beneath the framework level.
• Enjoy turning complex requirements into simple, robust software.
• Be intellectually curious and comfortable solving unfamiliar problems.
• Communicate confidently with both technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Be collaborative, pragmatic and open to feedback.
• Take pride in building reliable, well-tested software.
• Take ownership of your work and follow through.
• Care about the customer and commercial outcome of what you build, not only the technical implementation.
• Want to develop into an exceptional engineer as the company grows.

Particularly Relevant Experience

You do not need to have worked with all of these technologies or problem areas. Experience in any of the following would stand out to us:

• Workflow orchestration and task execution: queues, scheduled jobs, pipelines, state machines or systems where work needs to be reliable, scalable and fault tolerant.
• AI and large language model integrations: prompt design, structured outputs, model evaluation, token and cost management, observability or production AI systems.
• Python and TypeScript in production environments.
• Frameworks such as React, Vue.js, Django or FastAPI.
• SQL, data modelling and data-heavy applications.
• API development and third-party integrations, including OAuth.
• Modern web application development and cloud infrastructure.
• Automated testing, CI/CD and production observability.
• Statistics, machine learning or applied AI.

None of these is a hard requirement. We value adaptability, sound engineering judgement and the ability to learn quickly.

How We Work

VARA has been built around the belief that difficult product problems are best solved by combining different forms of expertise.

Engineers work closely with colleagues across product, strategy and commercial disciplines. We expect everyone to bring expertise to the table while remaining curious about the perspectives of others. We value people who:

• Ask thoughtful questions.
• Communicate openly.
• Challenge ideas constructively.
• Make pragmatic decisions.
• Care about quality without over-engineering.
• Focus on solving the right problem rather than simply the most technically interesting one.
• Are comfortable with the pace and ambiguity of an early-stage company.

Because the team is small, your contribution will be visible and meaningful. You will have significant opportunities to broaden your responsibilities and influence both the technology and the way the engineering organisation develops.

What Success Looks Like

During your first year, you will have:

• Become a trusted member of the engineering team.
• Developed a strong understanding of the platform, its architecture and its customers.
• Shipped high-quality product features into production.
• Built effective working relationships across engineering, product and the wider team.
• Taken ownership of increasingly complex technical problems.
• Improved parts of the platform, tooling or engineering practices beyond the individual features you have delivered.
• Contributed positively to the growth and maturity of our engineering capability.

Why Join VARA?

This is an opportunity to join an ambitious company at an unusually early stage and help build a technologyproduct from the ground up.

You will work directly with an experienced founding team, have meaningful ownership of the software you build and be exposed to a broad range of engineering problems across product development, AI, data and infrastructure.

You will be joining while the engineering team is still small enough for individual decisions to matter. As the company grows, there will be significant scope to expand your responsibilities, deepen your technical expertise and help shape our engineering culture.

If you want to build ambitious technology, work closely with experienced colleagues and grow alongside an early-stage company, we’d love to hear from you.

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