Job Description
Senior Software Engineer Description Location: Remote/Hybrid (UK-based) Team: Engineering Reports to: VP of Engineering About SourceWhale Financial Timesʼ fastest-growing software company in Europe 2025, SourceWhale is a group of really smart people solving productivity problems for people-intensive industries using AI and automation. Founded in 2020, we are currently focused on automating the manual, tedious parts of sales and recruitment activities, empowering companies and their employees to get more done. The platform consolidates every stage of the industry's work-flows into one sleek, integrated tool. Building alongside cutting-edge LLMs, SourceWhale is poised to be the company that puts the AI 'agent' in recruitment agencies. Voted one of The Sunday Timesʼ Best Places to Work 2025, we pursue innovation, champion employee wellbeing and offer fast-paced growth in a supportive transatlantic culture. Our engineering team is a group of thoughtful, collaborative professionals who value quality, continuous improvement, and meaningful product outcomes over outputs. As we enter our next stage of growth, weʼre on the lookout for a Senior Software Engineer who wants to make an impact on a platform used all day, every working day, by thousands of people. The Role This is a senior role focused on technical leadership, stream-level delivery, and engineering excellence. Youʼll own complex technical work end-to-end, guide architectural and implementation decisions, mentor engineers across the stream, and help shape how we build software at SourceWhale. While this role remains hands-on, impact is measured not only by the code you write, but by how effectively you improve the quality, reliability, and effectiveness of the wider team. Youʼll work closely with Product Managers, QA Engineers, Designers, and Software Engineers to deliver scalable, high-quality solutions across a platform that includes: Python backend services, Svelte/jQuery frontend applications, AWS cloud infrastructure, CRM integrations, Chrome and email extensions, OpenAI-powered workflows and automation. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving technically complex problems while helping others grow and improving how teams operate. What Youʼll Do Lead complex technical delivery; Own the delivery of complex features and systems end-to-end; Break ambiguous product problems into scalable technical solutions; Balance speed, maintainability, reliability, and customer value in decision-making; Guide implementation decisions and technical trade-offs across the stream; Drive technical excellence; Write maintainable, predictable, scalable code; Perform thoughtful technical reviews that improve both code quality and engineer capability; Shape patterns, standards, and approaches that improve consistency across the stream; Identify and resolve systemic technical issues, not just isolated bugs; Influence architecture & design; Design efficient, scalable systems with long-term maintainability in mind; Evaluate architectural trade-offs across integrations, APIs, infrastructure, and product workflows; Anticipate scaling challenges and operational risks early; Contribute to broader engineering discussions through technical leadership and peer influence; Mentor & elevate engineers; Coach junior engineers on implementation, debugging, design patterns, and engineering practices; Provide timely, actionable technical feedback; Support a culture of collaboration, ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement; Lead through example by modelling strong engineering judgement and professionalism; Improve reliability & operations; Improve deployment reliability, monitoring, and observability across the stream; Participate in and lead production incident response where needed; Drive actionable post-mortems and operational improvements; Advocate for proactive quality practices that reduce long-term operational risk; Collaborate cross-functionally; Partner closely with Product and QA to ensure the team understands what is being built, why it matters, and how quality is maintained; Simplify complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders; Communicate risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly and early.
