Senior Software Engineer

About the role

This role owns the end-to-end delivery of features across our products, ensuring that solutions are built with scale, performance, and user needs at the forefront. You will direct parallel agent sessions while focusing your own attention on design reviews and complex architectural problems that require your expertise. The role demands a strong product mindset, where you challenge requirements and ensure the technical solution aligns with the commercial outcome. You will be responsible for your area of the codebase, making decisions that enable distributed systems to operate reliably. Additionally, you will mentor less experienced engineers, raising the standard of the team's output through guidance and technical leadership. You will also contribute to discovery and ideation, working closely with designers to prioritise and solve problems efficiently. Finally, you will build and improve the team's AI infrastructure, creating shared plugin skills and review processes that the entire engineering organisation relies on.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Owning your area of the codebase and its direction by scoping ambiguous problems end-to-end and building with distributed systems and scale in mind.
• Directing parallel agent sessions to deliver work while your own attention moves to design decisions, reviews, and complex problems where your judgement is essential.
• Playing an active role in the department's big technical moves, including security work, architectural changes, and platform upgrades.
• Building and improving the team's AI infrastructure beyond your own work, creating shared plugin skills and the review and CI loops the whole team relies on.
• Bringing product thinking into everything you build by understanding the user and commercial problem behind the brief and challenging requirements that do not serve the outcome.
• Mentoring less experienced engineers and holding the team's output to a high standard by showing others how to reach it.
• Working closely with technical leaders and Product Designers to offer technical input, paying special attention to scale, maintainability, and alignment.
• Influencing the technical direction of the product suite through discovery, ideation, and collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Ensuring that solutions are resilient and performant by anticipating load and failure points without over-optimising prematurely.
• Contributing to the definition and evolution of engineering standards, best practices, and technical documentation for the benefit of the whole team.
• Collaborating with data and analytics teams to validate the impact of changes and drive data-informed product decisions.
• Participating in on-call rotations and incident response to maintain the reliability and stability of our platforms.
• Translating complex technical constraints into clear requirements and trade-offs for product and design teams.
• Continuously refactoring and improving the codebase to reduce technical debt and increase long-term maintainability.

Requirements

• You have commercial experience with PHP and Laravel, or a similar MVC framework, where solid MVC fundamentals and framework concepts are valued more deeply than intimate knowledge of Laravel internals.
• You have experience working with Vue 3, React, Angular, or other modern JavaScript frameworks.
• You have production experience with AWS, including ECS, Lambda, SQS, EventBridge, and RDS, which is advantageous.
• You work AI-natively as a default, using tools like Claude Code, plugins, and skills fluently in your day-to-day work.
• You design solutions built for scale with little to no support, intuitively understanding where performance and load will bite and when early optimisation is not worth the effort.
• You understand what you are building and why, making product thinking an integral part of your role.
• You are a great communicator with strong attention to detail.
• You are comfortable influencing beyond your own team and collaborating effectively with stakeholders at all levels.

Nice to have

• None specified.

Practical notes

• Hybrid working model with up to 4 days per week working from home.
• Public transport season ticket loans are available.