Lead Software Engineer
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
The Financial Services team enables RVU to help customers make the best decisions around financial products, by helping them identify the right products from our partners across our three main brands Uswitch, Confused.com and money.co.uk. Our engineering team build the web apps, back office systems and tooling used to deliver the financial products pages across RVU's websites, integrate with our partners, track sales, optimise marketing, and manage business reporting. We are currently growing our offering to small and medium businesses by driving deeper integration with our partners' APIs, improving our customers' experience on our platform, streamlining customer journeys, and ensuring that the business has all the data it needs at its fingertips. Our technology stack is centred around Typescript, React and Node/Bun, running on Kubernetes in AWS.
What you'll be doing
Joining our team as a Lead (or Staff) Software Engineer, you will be working closely with business leads, commercial managers, ops executives, product managers, data analysts, designers and fellow engineers to solve business problems with software.
This is a Lead/Staff level role with a bias towards technical expertise over management. As a product team a lot of our time is spent on the front end, but you'll be contributing across the full stack from infrastructure, databases, pipelines, servers, CDNs, to web UIs and monitoring and analysing performance. This includes building responsive accessible React components aligned with our design system, working with APIs, using real-time metrics and alerting, interacting with databases, and keeping our applications secure. You will help to identify opportunities for process improvements, conduct code reviews, and ensure solutions are properly tested with a focus on best practices and quality assurance. We're leaning-in to the current AI revolution, having incorporated AI into several of our workflows, and we're actively working on a number of projects with AI at the core. So you'll also be working closely with AI not just as a development tool, but as a business enabler. This includes finding new and better ways to leverage AI to generate lasting value, and evangelising AI adoption across the business. Most importantly, you will be supporting and improving the engineering team's delivery & technical expertise in a continuous learning environment. You'll contribute to defining and maintaining best practices to ensure our software remains robust, scalable and maintainable, using your technical skills to help shape the future of Financial Services within RVU, inspiring and guiding the team along the way.
Requirements
Do you have experience in TypeScript?, We're looking for a technical expert who will be a multiplier for the team: bringing your own experience and knowledge to enrich the skills and foster the growth of our high performing engineering team. This is a full stack role, so you'll be just as comfortable building cloud-native scalable applications as you are at styling responsive React components. But as a staff engineer you will go beyond just delivering features. You will be empowering the whole team to create robust well-tested software that works everywhere, ensuring attention to detail, but knowing when to pull them back to avoid getting stuck down valueless rabbit holes. You will have experience ranging from building MVPs through to large scale production systems, in each case knowing where to strike the balance between rigour and urgency, comfortable making pragmatic decisions that benefit the business. You will identify friction points and potential improvements and be able to put a business value on them so the team can focus their efforts appropriately to maximise return to the organisation. In addition, it's important that you understand the benefits that AI can bring to a business like ours, so we're also looking for experience developing AI enabled applications and workflows. This includes knowledge around platforms and frameworks (e.g. N8N, Mastra), context engineering, using vector stores, RAG, fine-tuning and evaluation. You will have a growth mindset, always keen to learn and explore, and you like to dig deep to understand how things work. You will be able to debug large and complex systems, not just fixing the problems, but building a fundamental understanding of how the system works to the point where improvements become obvious. You will keep abreast of industry developments: assessing and introducing new libraries, new technologies, new tools and new approaches, in particular leveraging advances in AI technology to the benefit of the team and the business. Other skills required for the role include:
- Strong Typescript skills, convinced of the benefits of statically typed languages
- Deep knowledge of the Node ecosystem (node, npm, yarn), including bundling and dependency management. Familiarity with Bun is also desirable
- Proficient with AI tooling including delivering code using CLI or editor-based LLM agents, and using MCP servers
- Solid understanding of the React paradigm, including one-way data binding, declarative programming, rules of hooks, react anti-patterns
- Practical experience of software engineering principles and managing complexity (e.g. separation of concerns, design patterns, domain-driven design) and an appreciation and aspiration to write elegant clean code, understanding that simple often isn't easy
- Familiarity with container-based cloud-native applications, and architectural patterns such as REST APIs, message passing, horizontal and vertical scaling and load balancing
- Knowledge of web security concerns (e.g. SQL injection, XSS, CORS, cookies, authentication/authorisation techniques).
Experience with the following is a plus:
- Kubernetes, Prometheus, Argo workflows, GitHub Actions, Elasticsearch/Opensearch, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, DBT data pipelines, Fastly, Storybook, component libraries and design systems, Builder.io, Bun.
Benefits & conditions
Pulled from the full job description
- Employee assistance programme
- Company pension
- Cycle to work scheme
- Work from home
- Company events
- Car scheme