Senior Backend Engineer

Job Description

At a Glance

Us: Fast growing startup of 90+ people. Remote team, mainly based in the UK. YC alumni (summer 2019). We’re on a mission to connect people around the world to make trustworthy data more accessible and facilitate world-changing research 🚀

You: An experienced T-shaped back-end software engineer with a product mindset.

The Role

At Prolific we have a united Tech team with Engineering, Data, Product, Design and Research all working closely as a cross-functional collective.

Within the collective, we have stream-aligned teams that are centred on product areas with an associated mission while platform teams provide services that support the stream-aligned teams and wider organisation.

All teams are cross-functional and given autonomy to self-organise towards the best possible outcomes. We optimise for the fast flow of work and search for continual improvement every day. We understand the importance of good engineering practices, so we place collaboration, communities, and personal improvement at the heart of our culture.

As a Software Engineer, you are a member of a stream-aligned team in a crucial collaborative role involved in all aspects of planning, prioritising, designing and most importantly building products that our customers love.

We look for T-shaped engineers, those that have a broad knowledge in many areas, but with a specialism which is their focus. In this role, your focus will be on all things back-end such as our customer-consumed APIs, internal APIs that support our Vue.js web stack and background task runners.

As a member of the Payments and Pricing team, who have the important job of managing the flow of funds from researchers to participants and defining our pricing strategy, this role will have a focus on monetary systems and integrations with third party payment providers.

What you'll be doing

• As a member of a cross-functional, stream aligned team you will work collaboratively with the teams’ engineering manager, product manager, designer, researcher and up to 4 other engineers
• Using agile software development practices and a product mindset, you will work as a team to plan, build and support software that our customers love and supports progress towards our OKRs
• Collaborating with teams outside of tech including our Finance team, customer support and external third parties
• Writing code - our stack is currently Vue.js, Python and NoSQL databases
• With a You Build It, You Run It mindset, you will have intimate knowledge of our products from code commit through to production operation
• Supporting production systems with shift right testing and tools such as Datadog
• You will champion our principles, be a community of practice member and help improve our engineering culture
• Pushing the boundaries, questioning the status quo, ensuring what we are doing and what we are building has high value and impact for our users

What you’ll bring

• Deep understanding of web applications and the surrounding stacks
• Experience building Python applications and using NoSQL databases
• Understand the importance of driving quality into code through test automation
• Have supported applications in production, with demonstrable experience of good observability practices
• Have worked in an environment with strong engineering practices
• Care about the product life cycle and are customer value focused
• Understand the value of continuous, iterative improvement using data to drive decisions and a culture of feedback
• Passionate about software development, sociable, with an appetite for learning and self-improvement

Even better if you have

Experience with any of the following is a bonus

• Working in a high compliance environment such as a fin-tech organisation
• Communicating with external teams to manage and integrate with third party APIs
• Building and supporting public cloud applications
• Event modelling and event driven architectures
• Building customer consumed APIs
• Serverless compute such as AWS Lambdas or GCP Functions.

What you’ll get

⚖️ Work Life Balance: We’re all looking to strike the right work-life balance, and as a remote-first company you’re able to work flexibly from home or our dog-friendly co-working space in Old Street. We offer 25 days of holiday, plus bank holidays of course, which you can opt out of if you’d like. We also offer summer hours, with early finish Fridays throughout June to August.

🏡 Family Life: We offer generous maternity, paternity and shared parental leave. Need to pick your child up from school? No Problem. Our flexible working gives you the childcare flexibility you need.

🧘 Wellbeing: We care deeply about our employee's well-being and that’s why we offer comprehensive Bupa private health insurance that disregards medical history and also Medicash (a health cash plan). We also offer a taxable monthly stipend of £150 that you can spend on whatever improves your wellness and remote working experience. Having a healthy working environment is really important to us and so we offer a £1,000 home office budget, along with a Mac laptop when you start - plus a £200 yearly top-up.

📚 Learn & Grow: Development is really important to us and we want to give all of our employees the opportunity to learn and grow. There are many personal growth and career progression opportunities available, as well as mentoring. And we also offer a £1,000 yearly budget for education, growth and training for you to use at your discretion.

💙 Culture: We’re a friendly bunch here at Prolific; open, transparent and inclusive. Although we’re a remote-first company, we still love to hang out with each other! We run collaborative quarterly company-wide meets up and team socials (both virtually and in-person) and it’s all paid for by us. Alongside this, we offer a £1,000 yearly team meet-up budget for discretionary meet-ups so that you can cover travel, food and accommodation. As a business we’re also committed to carbon offsetting; each month we donate money in your name to plant trees, and being remote we’re doing our bit to offset travel as well.

Our Interview Process

Talent Call: You'll meet with one of our Talent team and have an exploratory call about the role requirements, life at Prolific, as well as your background and aspirations.

Hiring Manager Interview: You'll interview with two members of the team, one of which will be the hiring manager. You'll have the opportunity to ask about the company and the role, and we'll ask you questions about your experiences and goals. Panel Interview: We'll hold a panel interview that evaluates skills required for the role. You'll meet with more of our team and may be asked to complete a presentation or task. You'll be compensated with a £50 voucher 💰 for completing the task because we know your time is valuable! Final Interview: We will deep dive into your past experiences, goals, motivations, and skills all aligned to our Prolific Principles. You'll speak with two to three members of the team and - as always - have an opportunity to ask questions about the role and company.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Monitoring

Prolific is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. We welcome all applications, and consider them without regard to race, religion, belief, age, gender, gender expression, gender identity, gender reassignment, disability, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, sex or sexual orientation.

We are committed to ensuring a fair recruitment process, it's essential to our success. Under the Equality Act (2010) we collect information from individuals at the point of application. We anonymously monitor the profiles of individuals that apply to each vacancy to ensure that no individual is unfairly discriminated against or disadvantaged.

Privacy Statement

By submitting your application, you agree that Prolific may collect your personal data for recruiting and global organisation planning. Prolific's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Prolific may process, where Prolific may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Prolific’s use of your personal information.