Senior Software Engineer (Backend & Systems)

Key Responsibilities

Required Hard Skills

• Backend engineering depth — production services in Go and/or Python; TypeScript/Node useful. Multi-language comfort matters more than any single stack.

• Data modelling and relational databases — PostgreSQL, schema design, migrations, query performance, and reasoning about data integrity.

• Distributed and cross-service debugging — tracing behaviour across services, queues, and databases to isolate a root cause.

• Third-party integration engineering — external APIs with imperfect contracts: auth expiry, partial failures, retries, idempotency.

• Reliability practice — observability, structured logging, tracing, failure-mode analysis, and recovery design.

• Testing and evaluation — unit and scenario tests, invariant checks, and measuring correctness of non-deterministic (AI-backed) output.

• Cloud and infrastructure — GCP preferred (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub); Docker and CI/CD.

• Working with LLM-backed services — using them as components, understanding their failure modes, and validating their output. Prior agent-framework experience is a plus, not a requirement.

Required Soft Skills

• Calibrates depth to stakes. Ships routine, low-risk work quickly; deliberately slows down on core systems, data models, and anything touching money or client data — and can tell the difference without being told.

• Verifies before concluding. Checks the premise of a bug report rather than building on it; can distinguish a real defect from correct behaviour measured the wrong way. Reads the system before changing it. Builds a working model of how something actually behaves, then changes it.

• Owns outcomes, not tickets. Goes past the literal ticket text when the ticket is wrong, incomplete, or describes the wrong problem.

• Strong communicator of design decisions, trade-offs, and risk, to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Pragmatic and collaborative — high standards without perfectionism, and works well with Product and Operations.

Nice-to-Have Skills / Experiences

• Experience in both high-growth startups and larger engineering organisations. Accounting, fintech, or other domain where correctness is non-negotiable. Document processing, OCR, or information-extraction pipelines.

• Vector databases / retrieval (e.g. Qdrant) and prompt or model evaluation. Frontend familiarity (Vue or React) — useful for full-feature ownership, not a core requirement.

• B2B SaaS background.

Type of Degree

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience. Strong CS fundamentals matter; the credential does not.

Years of Experience in Field

• 6+ years of professional software engineering, with a majority in backend or systems work. Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial production system (not just feature delivery within someone else's design).

• Experience at an organisation with mature engineering standards is valuable.