Senior Backend Engineer (Tech Lead)

Job Description

Let's start with our BENefits

(... It's all in the name! 😉)

💰 Competitive base salary + equity, so you own what you build

💳 £100 monthly personal Ben Balance: for whatever works for you, whether that's Netflix, Spotify, or a really expensive cup of coffee! This allowance will increase by £50 for each year of service until you reach £250

🔋 £1000 annual Learning & Personal Development Ben Balance: plus 3 days paid study leave a year to support you with your professional development

👩🏽‍💻 £1000 work from home set up allowance, which you can put towards your home office

🍔 Weekly lunch provided in office so you can spend quality time with the team over some tasty food!

🏖 28 days of holidays a year (plus bank holidays, which you have the option of swapping for days of celebration that are significant to you)

🌴 ...and an option to buy or sell 5 days per year. Also, your holiday entitlement will increase to 30 days at your 3rd year of service!

🍼 Enhanced parental leave and workplace nursery scheme to support with the cost of childcare in a nursery setting

🧠 Comprehensive and tailored mental health support through a leading provider

💪 Access to a Gympass membership!

❤️ Comprehensive Private Medical Insurance

🍿 Team activities: we have quarterly team social budgets to support spending time together and we frequently organise company wide events

📅 Flexible working - we're serious about life/work balance

Diversity and Culture at Ben

(...because it doesn't belong at the bottom of an ad!)

Our culture is ever-evolving and is defined by our people. We don’t hire clones, we hire individuals.

• We celebrate diversity

• We listen to our people

• We work autonomously

  and...

• We have fun!

We are organically growing a brilliantly diverse, inclusive and respectful bunch of people we are extremely proud of. This should go without saying but all applications are very much welcome. If you need any adjustments to support you with your application, just let us know by emailing jobs@thanksben.com.

Your Mission

You will challenge the complexity in the employee benefit domain and constantly deliver value (benefit!) to our users. You will show strong technical leadership and ensure Ben’s platform is reliable and scalable.

We’re looking for self-starters who are seeking a fast-paced environment where they can make a difference. Our team is small, which means high autonomy, ownership, and responsibility. We love what we do, have fun and, while we ship on time, take life-work balance seriously.

What you'll be working on

• Design, implement and deliver software features with full ownership, using your technical expertise

• Implement payment card APIs and payment transaction handlers

• Integrate with HRIS (Human Resources Information System) and our benefit supplier partners

• Take ownership of our employee benefits management platform and ensure their reliability

• Lead and deliver your implementations from start to finish, including deployment of new services by expanding our application infrastructure within AWS

• Drive initiative across squads to identify and solve important problems, coordinating with others on cross-cutting technical issues

• Collaborate with product stakeholders and other members of the team to scope and estimate optimal solutions for business problems

• Proactively define backend chapter initiatives and own the deliveries

• Facilitate and lead the backend architecture discussions, implementations and migrations

• Ensure that security considerations are taken into account, based on current best practices (e.g. OWASP Top 10, AWS Well-Architected Framework) in all software development and infrastructure projects

Behind the scenes

Our cross-functional delivery team is focused on business goals and solving problems in an efficient manner. We want the team to collaborate on new ideas and projects to find the best solutions.

Ben is built on Python 3, Django, PostgreSQL and React. We run on AWS and follow engineering best practices, with a pragmatic approach.

Your Skills and Experience

• Strong commercial experience working with Python and Django

• Strong commercial experience in event-driven architecture

• Have a strong background in distributed data processing, software engineering design, and data modelling concepts

• Proven record in leading software development teams to achieve their business goals

• Excellent software engineering knowledge: Clean architecture & design patterns, SOLID design principles and clean code

• Strong technical leadership; guides teammates on more difficult designs, and sets up new projects to ensure architectural success.

• Apply information security in building secure web applications and infrastructure configurations

• Understand and appreciate the principles and practices of agile and lean ways of working, but with a pragmatic edge

• Excellent communication skills adaptable to both tech and business audiences

• Experience working with AWS services such as EC2, SES, S3 etc.

• Experience in leading a backend chapter would be a plus

and you...

• are a self-starter who thrives on autonomy, enjoys a rapid pace and wants to make a difference

• have a continuous improvement mindset. You appreciate that there are always ways to do things better and ensure your team does too

• have a preference for action-oriented behaviour with just enough analysis, as compared to too much time spent doing analysis with no action

• have the ability to make decisions balancing different factors such as business requirements, technical integrity, overall priorities etc.

• are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences

• are solution-focused with a pragmatic approach to problem-solving

• are excellent at time management

• are a leader who always prioritises team/business/user success and celebrates it as if they are your own

• appreciate the opportunities and challenges of a distributed work environment