Staff+ Software Engineer

Role overview Set technical direction for a software platform as a hands-on Staff- or Principal-level engineer. You’ll shape long-term strategy with product and engineering leaders, lead the design and delivery of high-risk systems, and raise engineering capability across the organisation while continuing to write production code.

Responsibilities - Translate business goals into a multi-year technical direction and an executable platform roadmap. - Lead critical system design from initial decisions through production, including data architecture, AI conversation workflows, and multi-tenant services. - Make and document consequential choices about architecture, service boundaries, data models, and build-versus-buy decisions. - Set and uphold standards for reliability, security, observability, performance, and cost. - Mentor senior engineers, contribute to hiring and career development, and partner with product leadership on product direction. - Prototype and implement difficult technical work, respond to major incidents, and explain architecture to enterprise stakeholders.

Requirements - Demonstrated Staff-level or equivalent technical leadership across multiple teams or an engineering organisation. - A track record of setting technical direction, aligning stakeholders without relying on formal authority, and delivering the resulting strategy. - Experience leading production systems with significant scale or complexity, including ownership of migrations, incidents, and later consequences of design decisions. - Experience leading serious production incident response through root cause analysis and lasting fixes. - Recent, regular production coding and the ability to work effectively amid uncertainty with a small, fast-moving team. - Broad technical judgment across software and infrastructure; the role requires leadership that remains closely connected to implementation.

Nice to have - Production experience with AI or LLM products, enterprise SaaS, multi-tenancy, streaming systems, or large-scale cloud infrastructure. - Familiarity with Kotlin, TypeScript, Python, Rust, React, Postgres, DynamoDB, Kafka, AWS compute services, or infrastructure as code. - Technical writing, speaking, or meaningful open-source contributions.

Benefits and work setup - Remote-first work, with access to a London office and quarterly international team gatherings. - Six weeks of paid annual leave, significant equity, and compensation described as top-of-market for the level. - Opportunity to influence company-wide technical direction alongside senior leadership.