Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer – Pre-IPO AI Scale-Up | Remote-First (UK) | Up to £140,000 + 15% Bonus + VSOPs

This AI scale-up is profitable, has won several awards and is on the Pre-IPO Watchlist's Top 50 companies to watch. It has outgrown its early architecture, and it needs senior engineers to build what comes next.

It's an opportunity to own critical systems at a company with strong commercial momentum and a clear route towards IPO.

Your impact

You'll take ownership of major parts of a platform that handles around 10,000 transactions per second at roughly 50ms latency. You'll:

• Lead the design and delivery of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems
• Design event-driven architectures and messaging pipelines that perform under heavy load
• Make key architectural decisions and see them through to production
• Set engineering standards for performance, testing and reliability
• Mentor mid-level engineers and raise the bar across the team
• Work with product and engineering leadership on technical direction and priorities

What you'll bring

• 5-8 years' software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend
• Proven experience designing and building distributed systems at scale
• Strong experience with messaging or streaming platforms such as Kafka, Google Pub/Sub or RabbitMQ
• Strong programming ability in Go, or in Rust or Java
• Deep understanding of concurrency, latency, scalability and system design
• Experience owning services in high-volume production environments

The package

• Salary up to £140,000
• 15% bonus
• Virtual stock options (VSOPs) ahead of a potential IPO
• Remote-first, with just two days a month in London
• Room to grow towards Staff or Engineering Manager level