Staff Software Engineer

Definely
London, UK
3 months ago

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Working hours
Regular working hours
Job source

Tech stack

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) Artificial Intelligence Software Quality Distributed Systems Python (Programming Language) Data Streaming TypeScript ReactJS Backend Build Management Front End Software Development

Job description

We’re looking for a high-calibre Staff Software Engineer to help shape how we build and scale our products at Definely.

We’re looking for someone who is highly product-minded, intellectually curious, and motivated by solving meaningful user problems. In this role, you’ll operate across the stack, shaping both the user experience and the underlying systems, while helping define how we design, build, and scale our platform.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to shape both what we build and how we build it. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll drive technical and product decisions, raise the bar for quality, and play a key role in evolving our architecture as we scale.

What you’ll do

  • Lead the development of product features end-to-end, from problem shaping with product and design through to backend implementation, frontend delivery, and iteration
  • Design and build scalable, reliable systems that power AI-driven features and workflows
  • Translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive, performant, and trustworthy product experiences
  • Work across the stack using TypeScript and Python, contributing to both user-facing applications and backend systems
  • Drive improvements in performance, reliability, and overall product quality across the stack
  • Contribute to technical strategy and architectural decisions across the engineering team
  • Collaborate closely with design to deliver high-quality user experiences, while ensuring strong underlying system design
  • Raise the bar for engineering standards, including code quality, testing, and observability
  • Mentor and support other engineers, helping to elevate technical capability across the team

Requirements

Do you have experience in TypeScript?, * Significant experience building and scaling complex, user-facing products across the stack

  • Strong experience with modern frontend development (React, TypeScript) and solid backend experience (e.g. Python or similar)
  • Ability to design and reason about distributed systems, APIs, and data flows
  • Strong product mindset, you think in terms of user problems and outcomes, not just implementation
  • Experience working closely with product and design to shape solutions, not just deliver them
  • Ability to take ownership of ambiguous problems and drive them through to impact
  • Experience contributing to or leading architectural decisions across systems
  • Strong communication skills and ability to influence across teams

We’ll be lucky if you:

  • Have led or significantly shaped architecture in a scaling product
  • Have experience building AI-powered or data-heavy user experiences
  • Enjoy working in product-driven, fast-paced environments
  • Care deeply about usability, performance, and craft in development
  • Have experience mentoring or acting as a technical leader across teams

Benefits & conditions

  • Competitive salary & annual bonus based on performance
  • Equity in Definely
  • Quarterly team socials + holiday parties
  • Hybrid working + 1 month “work from anywhere”
  • 25 days holiday + bank holidays
  • Take your birthday off
  • £750 annual learning & development budget
  • Private healthcare (incl. dental & optical)
  • Enhanced parental leave + Workplace Nursery salary sacrifice scheme
  • Additional perks: Cycle to Work
  • Top-quality equipment

About Definely

At Definely, we’re building the Review layer for legal work in the age of AI.

As AI transforms how contracts are drafted, the challenge is no longer just generation, it’s verification. Lawyers remain accountable for what goes out the door, but the volume and complexity of AI-generated work is pushing traditional review to its limits.

Definely gives lawyers a structured way to understand and verify complex agreements, modelling contracts as systems of definitions, cross-references, and dependencies, surfacing hidden risks and making review more rigorous and defensible.

Trusted by leading law firms and global enterprises, including A&O Shearman, Slaughter and May, BP, and Barclays, we integrate directly into the tools lawyers already use.

We recently raised our Series B and are backed by Microsoft, Google, and Octopus Ventures. This is a rare opportunity to shape a new category at the moment it becomes essential.

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on indeed.com

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

1:21 min

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Anna Mcdougall · JS Congress

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Structuring and scaling the backend engineering team

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Developer experience and project variety at scale

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Transitioning into backend engineering from web development

Stefan Lingler Stefan Lingler +1 · Coffee With Developers

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