Principal Software Engineer - Data and Performance

About Us

We're Dayshape—an award-winning software scale-up with big ambitions and the momentum to match. Trusted by Big Four and many other top professional services firms globally, our AI-powered resource management platform is helping organisations to achieve extraordinary results.

Our platform stands apart as the only solution that combines advanced AI, real-time project financials, and firm-wide insights to elevate resource management to a strategic function. By driving profitable growth, powering confident decisions, and ensuring satisfied clients and teams—we're helping our customers build strong organisations and careers for the long term.

Why our customers love Dayshape:

• We help professional firms optimise margins and increase revenue, unlocking access to more profitable work.
• We provide complete operational visibility today and the tools to confidently predict tomorrow.
• We empower firms to become the places where top talent wants to work - and the best clients want to work with.

Recognised as Scotland's fastest-growing tech company in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for three consecutive years and more recently as the Enterprise Digital Tech Business of the Year at the 2024 ScotlandIS awards, we've consistently proven our ability to innovate and deliver real impact—and we're always looking for like-minded people to join us.

At Dayshape, our purpose is to improve people's working lives, and our culture is an important driving force in helping us to do just that. We're a friendly, inclusive, and ambitious team—driven by our values and a shared commitment to success. If you're ready to join a fast-growing, high-impact company that's reimagining resource management, then let's talk.

About The Role

Dayshape is making a significant investment in our product portfolio and defining how both AI and large volume work fit in the critical role of resource management.

We are seeking to introduce new ways of accessing, using and interacting with the data that matters to our customers, enabling extraordinary business results. That's where you come in.

What You'll Do

• Support our product and engineering managers in prioritisation, scoping and leading delivery of product features
• Work as part of our engineering team to enhance quality, scalability, performance, maintainability, configurability, and usability
• Support, mentor, and coach other members of the team
• Be involved in the entire life cycle of features, including idea creation, deployment, and longer-term updates and enhancements
• Work on a wide variety of different challenges across the product and codebase
• Partner with engineering teams to support platform adoption, drive best practices and troubleshoot issues.
• Anticipate and address stakeholder needs proactively.
• Encourage constructive disagreement and resolve conflicts respectfully ensuring alignment across teams.
• Navigate ambiguity confidently and guide others through complex problems.
• Define comprehensive technical plans supporting wider team delivery.
• Contribute to team planning helping to align it with the strategic goals of the group.
• Adjust execution plans as needed.

About You

• You are a strong back-end developer experienced in operating within our tech stack, which is .NET (framework & Core), Azure SQL Server and the Azure platform.
• You are experienced in instrumenting and analysing code
• Great at breaking down big tasks into small chunks, solving tricky problems and tackling risks
• Knowledgeable about a range of technologies, and quick to learn
• Experienced in a broad range of database and search technologies (such as lucene, elastic search, nosql, mssql)
• A great collaborator with strong communication skills

Bonus points if you have

• Experience of working with Azure Cognitive Search
• Experience of working with Fabric or similar data pipelines
• Experience with MS SQL views

What You'll Get

• Starting salary between £65,000 and £80,000, depending on experience
• Earning potential in the Principal Engineer salary band up to £85,000
• At least £1,000 per year to spend on professional and personal development
• 33 days' holiday per year (including bank holidays), increasing by 1 day each year to a maximum of 40 days
• Paid four week sabbatical in your fifth anniversary year on top of your holiday entitlement
• Enhanced family leave policies
• Private medical insurance, including dental and vision benefits
• Income protection and death in service cover
• Matched 5% auto-enrolment workplace pension scheme
• Access to wellbeing offerings, such as our Employee Assistance Programme and a dedicated counselling service
• Volunteering time - up to 20 hours a year to participate in volunteer work
• Regular All Hands meeting for inspiration and over-communication
• Time out of the working week for team socials each month, with a mix of in-person and virtual options: past events include hiking, family BBQs, board games and at-home cocktail classes!
• Genuinely nice, smart people to work with, who are excited about growing our company

Working Details

This is a full-time role (37.5 hours per week). We typically work from 09:00 - 17:30 from Monday to Friday, though we can be flexible around this, just let us know.

We're ideally looking for someone in/around Edinburgh, able to work on a hybrid basis between home and our Haymarket office. We don't mandate required office days, but we find that most of the team enjoy working from the office 2-3 days a week to connect with their team and other Dayshapers, to make use of space, and for meetings and collaboration. We may be open to the possibility of this being a remote role, as long as you are based in the UK.

Join the team!

Equality of opportunity is more than just a responsibility: we believe it's a huge advantage to welcome a variety of experiences and perspectives into the team. Diversity is a great asset and, as such, we strongly encourage applications from any background.

This is your opportunity to really influence how we get things done, and how our product develops to meet our customer's needs. We're doing well, but there's lots more to do in order to maintain the high bar and pace that we've set.

If your experience isn't an exact match for this job description, but you have transferrable skills/experience that you think would be a great fit, please outline this in a cover letter. Everyone here is growing personally as the company grows, so if that sounds like something you'd like to be part of, we'd love to see your application.

• Please note the successful candidate for this role will be subject to background checks and will have an opportunity to declare anything to us beforehand*