Senior Software Engineer

Description We're rebuilding our platform around an AI-orchestrated delivery pipeline — and we're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to own how that work gets designed, generated, gated and released. The role at a glance Title: Senior Software Engineer Location: Southampton, UK — hybrid, with one anchor day per week in the office (currently Thursday) Compensation: £74,000 – £80,000 per year Contract: Full-time, permanent Team: Engineering — Product. Five engineers including this role, reporting to the Engineering Lead This is a senior engineering role on our Engineering — Product team, and it's built around two things. The first: Ownership. You'll take large, ambiguous problems end-to-end — framing the problem, designing the solution, delivering it and operating it in production. Not picking up specced tickets, and not handing off at merge. You bring the problem and your proposed solution, and you follow it all the way through. The second: How the work actually gets done. We're rebuilding our platform around an AI-orchestrated delivery pipeline: it's TypeScript throughout, and are heavily utilizing agents for our code production. That changes what a senior engineer's day looks like. The value isn't in producing code faster — it's in designing the system the code has to fit, building the guardrails, tests and evals that keep generated work inside those lines, and reviewing output with enough judgement that nothing reaches production you couldn't explain line by line. If you want to be the person deciding how a whole team ships software, this is that role. Role Focus & Operating Context You'll own system design across the platform, setting the architectural direction alongside product and deciding how product changes get delivered through it. The decisions you make in your first few months will shape the platform for years. The delivery loop is fast and we intend to keep it that way: trunk-based development, daily releases, quick CI, short feedback cycles. Part of the job is spotting friction in that loop and fixing it rather than reporting it. You'll sit in a tightly-knit team of five engineers, pair with a product manager in a squad on each initiative, and operate with real autonomy. What You'll Work On And Own The architecture — how the platform is structured, and the trade-offs behind every callThe pipeline — the skills, agents, guardrails, tests and evals that decide what good output looks likeWhat ships — full accountability for generated code in production, including being able to explain any of itThe release loop — how quickly an idea gets from a conversation to a customerWhole initiatives — one squad, one product manager, one problem, yours from framing through to operating itThe team's leverage — the patterns, context and tooling that make the other four engineers faster Requirements What you'll bring 5+ years building and operating production software, now working at a senior level, with a track record of taking large, ambiguous projects from start to finishStrong system design capability — able to own architectural decisions, reason about trade-offs across performance, cost and complexity, and defend themA platform or DevOps-minded approach — comfortable owning CI/CD, delivery pipelines, environments and the tooling that surrounds how software gets shippedHands-on experience directing AI coding agents on real production work, with the judgement to verify and fully understand generated outputStrong TypeScript, with solid API and data experience (GraphQL and REST, Postgres, AWS), and comfort in a monorepo built around a core service and satellite servicesA questioning approach to tooling — you evaluate what is working, measure it, and are not wedded to any single vendor or assistant To Thrive In This Role, You'll Be Someone Who Brings the problem and the proposed solution, and follows through to productionNever accepts the status quo — asks whether the current process, tool or architecture is working, and improves it rather than tolerating itMakes progress on loosely-defined problems, pulling in the right people and stakeholders to get things across the lineExplains technical complexity in plain language to product and non-technical stakeholders, and thrives in a small, closely-connected teamIs genuinely curious about AI-native engineering — energised by an unproven, fast-moving way of working rather than unsettled by it