Senior Software Engineer

Role Overview

• Design, build, and maintain highly scalable web services, APIs, and backend systems that handle real-world production load with reliability and performance.
• Collaborate directly with the product team to evaluate ideas and rapid prototypes, proposing clear technical plans that balance ambition with pragmatism.
• Lead and drive the engineering team through delivery, from sprint planning and technical design through to deployment and post-release iteration.
• Architect and review solutions across the full stack, ensuring consistency in patterns, quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Define and uphold engineering standards including code review, testing strategy, CI/CD pipelines, and observability practices.
• Partner with product on rapid iteration cycles, keeping feedback loops short, reducing time-to-learn, and enabling the team to move with confidence.
• Proactively identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and reliability risks before they become problems.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and be a meaningful voice in engineering-wide discussions around direction, tooling, and process.
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical problems, providing clear thinking and solutions under pressure.
• Champion a culture of psychological safety, continuous learning, and high engineering craft within the team.

Requirements

• Significant hands-on experience building and operating highly scalable online systems and services in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in designing and building RESTful APIs and microservices architectures — with a deep understanding of trade-offs in distributed systems.
• Solid experience with multiple data storage paradigms: relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL (e.g. MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis), and the patterns that make each appropriate in context.
• Proven ability to coach and mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pair programming, technical guidance, and constructive feedback.
• Experience translating ambiguous product ideas or early prototypes into structured technical proposals and delivery plans.
• Demonstrated ability to lead an engineering team through a full delivery cycle — from technical design to release — while maintaining momentum and quality.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, system design, testing, and operational concerns (monitoring, alerting, incident response).
• Experience working in an agile, fast-paced product environment with short iteration cycles and close collaboration between engineering and product teams.
• Excellent communication skills — able to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A track record of pragmatic, outcome-focused decision-making: balancing technical rigour with the need to ship and learn quickly.
• Experience designing and consuming gRPC services, including protocol buffer schema design and inter-service communication patterns.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS).
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and deployment patterns (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including serverless, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code.
• Exposure to stream processing or real-time data pipelines at scale.
• Experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
• Prior experience in a tech lead or staff engineer capacity, with involvement in cross-team technical decision making.
• Contribution to open-source projects, engineering blog posts, or technical community involvement.
• Familiarity with product analytics, feature flagging, and experimentation frameworks to support rapid iteration.
• Experience with security-by-design principles and implementing secure coding practices across distributed systems.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Azure
• Cloud
• Distributed Systems
• Docker
• DynamoDB
• ElasticSearch
• Google Cloud Platform
• GRPC
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Microservices
• MongoDB
• MySQL
• NoSQL
• Postgres
• RabbitMQ
• Redis

Benefits

• We have offices in various UK locations and you will be expected to attend one of the offices at least 3 days per week:
• Farringdon, London
• Cwmbran, Wales
• Haddenham
• Applicants must already hold a legal right to work in the UK without time restrictions and without the need for future sponsorship. We are unable to provide Skilled Worker visa sponsorship.