Senior Software Engineer 2 (UK)

• Lead design and implementation of backend features and services that align with product strategy, security requirements, and quality standards. 

• Champion AI-assisted development within the team and research the bleeding edge of best practice to keep evolving your knowledge that you share with the team. 

• Author and review technical designs/RFCs; provide clear trade‑off analyses and decision records. 

• Develop clean, maintainable, and well‑tested code with appropriate automated tests (unit, integration, contract, performance). 

• Improve service reliability through SLOs, alerting, logging, and tracing; participate in on‑call with a blameless approach to incidents. 

• Collaborate closely with Product, Security, SRE, and Support to plan releases, manage risk, and deliver measurable customer value. 

• Contribute to architecture within team scope (API boundaries, data models, messaging patterns, failure handling). 

• Drive security‑by‑design practices (threat modelling, secure authZ/authN, secrets management, least privilege). 

• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design walkthroughs; help raise the bar on engineering practices. 

• Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines, developer experience, and testing effectiveness. 

• Contribute to sprint ceremonies, provide dependable estimates, and deliver on commitments with transparency. 

Essential  

• Strong experience building backend services and APIs in a modern language (TypeScript/Node.js preferred).  

• Solid understanding of API design (versioning, idempotency), request/response lifecycles, and integration patterns (REST/JSON, async messaging).  

• Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL): schema design, indexing, query optimisation, transactions, and safe migrations.  

• Experience with containers and cloud-native development (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices.  

• Hands-on with automated testing across the pyramid; familiarity with contract testing and test data management.  

• Practical knowledge of secure coding, authentication/authorisation, and secrets management.  

• Ability to investigate and resolve production issues methodically; familiarity with observability tooling (metrics, logs, traces).  

• Clear communication, cross-team collaboration, and mentoring skills.  

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science/software engineering or equivalent practical experience.  

Desirable  

• Deep TypeScript backend experience (type-driven development, dependency injection, modular architecture).  

• Familiarity with microservice and event-driven architectures (service boundaries, API gateways, asynchronous workflows).  

• Experience with messaging (e.g., Kafka, NATS, SNS/SQS) and outbox/transactional messaging patterns.  

• Infrastructure-as-Code and cloud platforms (e.g., Terraform, AWS/Azure/GCP) and serverless components where appropriate.  

• Advanced performance and cost optimisation of services and databases.  

• Experience with security reviews, threat modelling, and compliance considerations.  

• Experience improving developer workflows and CI/CD pipelines at team scale.