Lead Software Engineer

Hybrid: 2 days per week in our Tower Bridge office (Wednesdays & Thursdays) money.co.uk money.co.uk exists to help consumers make more informed financial decisions. Our free, online comparison service allows consumers to compare financial products, from credit cards to savings accounts, loans to travel money. We want our users to feel reassured that we're on their side when it comes to their finances. We’re part of RVU, a group of online brands that include: Confused, Uswitch, Tempcover, and Mojo Mortgages. We are known as the Financial Services team for Uswitch, Confused and money.co.uk, and our goal is to be the UK’s favourite way to choose the best financial products for big life events - from credit cards to use while travelling, to savings accounts to help move you closer to a dream purchase. As we continue to grow and expand our services, we are looking for talented individuals who share our passion for making a positive impact on people's lives. If you want to be part of a team that is transforming the way consumers navigate their finances, we would love to hear from you. The team The Financial Services team enables RVU to help customers make the best decisions around financial products, by helping them identify the right products from our partners across our three main brands Uswitch, Confused.com and money.co.uk. Our engineering team build the web apps, back office systems and tooling used to deliver the financial products pages across RVU's websites, integrate with our partners, track sales, optimise marketing, and manage business reporting. We are currently growing our offering to small and medium businesses by driving deeper integration with our partners' APIs, improving our customers' experience on our platform, streamlining customer journeys, and ensuring that the business has all the data it needs at its fingertips. Our technology stack is centred around Typescript, React and Node/Bun, running on Kubernetes in AWS. What you'll be doing Joining our team as a Lead (or Staff) Software Engineer, you will be working closely with business leads, commercial managers, ops executives, product managers, data analysts, designers and fellow engineers to solve business problems with software. This is a Lead/Staff level role with a bias towards technical expertise over management. As a product team a lot of our time is spent on the front end, but you'll be contributing across the full stack from infrastructure, databases, pipelines, servers, CDNs, to web UIs and monitoring and analysing performance. This includes building responsive accessible React components aligned with our design system, working with APIs, using real-time metrics and alerting, interacting with databases, and keeping our applications secure. You will help to identify opportunities for process improvements, conduct code reviews, and ensure solutions are properly tested with a focus on best practices and quality assurance. We’re leaning-in to the current AI revolution, having incorporated AI into several of our workflows, and we’re actively working on a number of projects with AI at the core. So you’ll also be working closely with AI not just as a development tool, but as a business enabler. This includes finding new and better ways to leverage AI to generate lasting value, and evangelising AI adoption across the business. Most importantly, you will be supporting and improving the engineering team’s delivery & technical expertise in a continuous learning environment. You'll contribute to defining and maintaining best practices to ensure our software remains robust, scalable and maintainable, using your technical skills to help shape the future of Financial Services within RVU, inspiring and guiding the team along the way. What we're looking for We're looking for a technical expert who will be a multiplier for the team: bringing your own experience and knowledge to enrich the skills and foster the growth of our high performing engineering team. This is a full stack role, so you'll be just as comfortable building cloud-native scalable applications as you are at styling responsive React components. But as a staff engineer you will go beyond just delivering features. You will be empowering the whole team to create robust well-tested software that works everywhere, ensuring attention to detail, but knowing when to pull them back to avoid getting stuck down valueless rabbit holes. You will have experience ranging from building MVPs through to large scale production systems, in each case knowing where to strike the balance between rigour and urgency, comfortable making pragmatic decisions that benefit the business. You will identify friction points and potential improvements and be able to put a business value on them so the team can focus their efforts appropriately to maximise return to the organisation. In addition, it’s important that you understand the benefits that AI can bring to a business like ours, so we’re also looking for experience developing AI enabled applications and workflows. This includes knowledge around platforms and frameworks (e.g. N8N, Mastra), context engineering, using vector stores, RAG, fine-tuning and evaluation. You will have a growth mindset, always keen to learn and explore, and you like to dig deep to understand how things work. You will be able to debug large and complex systems, not just fixing the problems, but building a fundamental understanding of how the system works to the point where improvements become obvious. You will keep abreast of industry developments: assessing and introducing new libraries, new technologies, new tools and new approaches, in particular leveraging advances in AI technology to the benefit of the team and the business. Other skills required for the role include: Strong Typescript skills, convinced of the benefits of statically typed languages Deep knowledge of the Node ecosystem (node, npm, yarn), including bundling and dependency management. Familiarity with Bun is also desirable Proficient with AI tooling including delivering code using CLI or editor-based LLM agents, and using MCP servers Solid understanding of the React paradigm, including one-way data binding, declarative programming, rules of hooks, react anti-patterns Practical experience of software engineering principles and managing complexity (e.g. separation of concerns, design patterns, domain-driven design) and an appreciation and aspiration to write elegant clean code, understanding that simple often isn't easy Familiarity with container-based cloud-native applications, and architectural patterns such as REST APIs, message passing, horizontal and vertical scaling and load balancing Knowledge of web security concerns (e.g. SQL injection, XSS, CORS, cookies, authentication/authorisation techniques). Experience with the following is a plus: Kubernetes, Prometheus, Argo workflows, GitHub Actions, Elasticsearch/Opensearch, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, DBT data pipelines, Fastly, Storybook, component libraries and design systems, Builder.io, Bun. You don’t need to tick off everything on this list - so don’t let that hold you back from applying. We want to make sure you’re learning plenty during your time with us! Our commitment to you We are dedicated to developing valuable, inclusive, and user-friendly products and services that deliver positive outcomes for all of our customers. To achieve this, it’s essential that our teams reflect the diverse range of people in our community. We believe in being the change we wish to see in the world, by embracing our differences and holding ourselves accountable to being open and inclusive teammates and wider community members. What we offer We want to give you a great work environment, support your growth both personally and professionally, and provide benefits that make your time at RVU even more enjoyable. Here are some of the benefits you can look forward to: 10% discretionary yearly bonus and yearly pay reviews (based on RVU and personal performance) A hybrid working approach with 2 in-office days per week and up to 22 working days per year to “work from anywhere” Employer-matching pension contributions up to 7.5% A one-off £300 “work from home” budget to help contribute towards a great work environment at home Excellent maternity, paternity, shared parental, and adoption leave policy, for those key moments in your life 25 days holiday (increasing with years of employment to 30 days) + 2 days “my time” per year Private medical cover, critical illness cover, and employee assistance programme A healthy learning and training budget Electric vehicle and cycle to work schemes Free in-office gym, accessible 7 days a week Free breakfast in the office daily You’ll be equipped with great technology (choice of Mac or Windows) Free access to the Calm and Peppy app for physical and mental health Regular events - from team socials to company-wide events with insightful external speakers, we want to make sure our colleagues continue to feel connected.