Staff Engineer | Manchester | £100k

Staff Engineer | AI-Driven Innovation

In the words of the VP Engineer:

"We are looking for a Staff Engineer to serve as a technical North Star for four high-impact product teams. This is a role for a visionary who still loves to get their hands dirty in the code, but whose greatest satisfaction comes from elevating the entire engineering organization.

You will be the bridge between our high-level product strategy and the execution of our product squads. Whether it’s launching zero-to-one AI products or leading the strategic decommissioning of legacy systems to make way for modern architectures, your influence will be felt across the entire tech stack."

The Role: Technical Excellence at Scale

As a Staff Engineer, you aren't just a "super-coder", you are a force multiplier. You will drive the architectural standards, principles, and DevOps practices that allow our teams to move with speed and safety.

What You’ll Do:

• Architectural Leadership: Define and drive the technical roadmap across 4 product teams. You’ll ensure our move toward Kotlin and Java microservices on AWS is resilient, scalable, and future-proof.
• Legacy Transformation: Lead the charge in identifying and strangling legacy applications, replacing them with modern, high-performance systems without disrupting global operations.
• Zero-to-One Innovation: Partner with Product Managers to rapidly prototype and build brand-new AI-integrated products, taking them from a whiteboard concept to a production-ready reality.
• AI-First Workflow: Champion the adoption of AI development tools (Claude, Copilot, etc.) to optimize our engineering lifecycle and reduce time-to-market.
• Mentorship & Culture: You don’t just "tell" you "teach." You will mentor Lead and Senior Engineers, fostering a culture of curiosity, technical excellence, and a "you build it, you run it" DevOps mindset.
• Drive Principles: Establish the "Golden Path" for development, ensuring that CI/CD, security, and observability are baked into everything we build.

What You Bring

• Backend Mastery: Deep expertise in Java and Kotlin, with a strong opinion on when to use which.
• Cloud Native DNA: Extensive experience with AWS (Lambda, EKS, RDS, EventBridge) and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strategic Thinker: You can zoom out to see the big picture of a multi-team ecosystem, then zoom in to help a squad debug a complex concurrency issue.
• Pragmatic Modernizer: You have a proven track record of successfully migrating or replacing legacy systems in a production environment.
• AI Enthusiast: You are already using AI tools to 10x your own productivity and are excited to help a whole organization do the same.
• Leadership without Ego: You lead through influence and technical respect, not just title. You thrive on seeing others succeed.

Ready to lead the evolution?

If you are a Staff Engineer who is passionate about building new things, fixing old things, and helping people grow, let’s talk.