Software Engineer (Python/React)

Location: UK or Portugal

Department: Engineering

Hours: Full-time

About YLD: Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward. Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract, inspire, develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London, Lisbon, and Porto.

About the role: As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team building innovative products. We expect you to be curious, passionate, driven, and enthusiastic. You’ll be proficient at problem-solving, and crafting scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant architectures. You’ll be an effective communicator and a team player. Furthermore, you and your team will move in a fast‑paced engineering environment, achieving outstanding results and delivering exciting projects.

About You: A YLD Software Engineering Consultant is a highly‑skilled developer who exemplifies the highest standard in software engineering and enjoys sharing their knowledge and experience with others. You’ll have the opportunity to build and deliver software within some interesting projects, both in terms of the product and the methodology. We work in an Agile environment (Scrum) with a test‑first mindset. We are also big advocates of pair programming and nothing is released until we have a code review. You have a real passion for problem‑solving and are an active learner who gets excited by working collaboratively with those around you. If you are a proactive, adaptable, and enthusiastic engineer with must‑have experience in either Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar languages, and a passion for leveraging multiple technologies to build exceptional backend solutions, we encourage you to apply.

Day‑to‑day responsibilities:

• Crafting excellent products! As a Full‑Stack Engineer, you will be building new features that meet the needs of our clients' customers.
• Continuously delivering changes to products, as our client is moving to a full CI/CD model.
• Working closely with your team, regularly collaborating on engineering initiatives to continually push yourselves to be better.
• Learning, growing, and mentoring the engineering team to accelerate their career growth and encourage them to progress.
• Working with the Lead to architect, design, build, and deliver highly available, always-on, zero downtime products.
• Being responsible for the production operation and monitoring of products inline with SLAs.
• Driving good practices within your team, making an impact on the whole department.
• Participating in regular show and tells, promoting your work to both your department and the wider company.

Skills and experience:

• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Go with ability to rapidly learn new languages.
• Experience with modern frameworks across the stack (FastAPI, Gin, Express, etc.).
• Production experience with React, modern build tools, state management, responsive design, and accessibility standards.
• Comprehensive testing experience (unit, integration, e2e, security) and performance optimization.
• Scalable system design patterns, load balancing, and high‑availability architectures.
• Database design and optimization (both relational and NoSQL).
• API development (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and event‑driven architectures.
• Caching strategies and message queue systems (Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).
• CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Monitoring, observability, and performance optimisation tools.
• You can keep a cool head when debugging production issues.

Personal attributes:

• Self‑motivated, proactive and constantly looking for ways to improve and develop yourself.
• A good communicator, both in writing and verbally. You’ll be able to explain technical ideas and concepts in business‑friendly language.
• Detail oriented.
• Problem‑solving skills that balance innovation with pragmatic technology choices to solve business needs.
• Used to working in a team‑oriented, collaborative environment.
• Analytical and problem‑solving oriented.
• A genuine believer in diversity and fairness.

Benefits:

• Company private health care.
• Enhanced fully paid maternity and paternity leave for up to 6 months.
• Company’s Pension Scheme (UK Only).
• 25 days annual holiday (excluding public holidays).
• £2000/€2000 annual allowance for training/conferences.
• £300/€300 annual allowance for additional hardware.
• Mental health support: access to Spill app.
• Meditation/Sleep support: Headspace or Calm app subscription.
• Bonus (depending on company performance and results).
• Company laptop.
• Generous referral schemes.

Recruitment Process:

• 1st interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins).
• Take‑home challenge (~1h).
• Technical interview with our senior developers (1h30).

Our Values:

• Growing every day.
• Including everyone.
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics.
• Inspiring solutions.
• Winning together.

We’re an equal‑opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability status. Likewise, we also offer a remote‑first working environment, meaning that flexible working and work‑life balance come as standard for all employees.