Lead Software Engineer - B/E Specialist

This role is focused on leading the back-end development of APIs and services that power Little Journey's innovative and growing healthcare and life science products.  As we complete a ground-up rebuild of our legacy back-end applications, this role will be the founding member of our B/E engineering team.

_This position is remote in the UK, with a hybrid option in Leeds.

_The role

_Joining our team of F/E and F/S Typescript engineers, you will be the B/E specialist and a lead engineer, designing, building and maintaining Little Journey's back-end applications, APIs and services.  You will make critical decisions on how we design and implement our products and engineer them for performance, scale and modularity. Embedded in one of our product squads, you will have a remit that cuts across all Little Journey's software products, leading our back-end tribe and working closely with F/E leads to meet product challenges holistically.

You will champion pragmatic, standards driven engineering practises: supporting, mentoring and empowering F/E and F/S colleagues to implement complete features.

You will have a significant impact on the whole product lifecycle, guiding technical planning and decision making, implementing back-end features, designing, provisioning and maintaining infrastructure and supporting effective CI/CD pipelines and processes.

_Our Tech Stack

• Full-stack Typescript
• Terraform
• PostgreSQL
• NodeJS, NestJS, Prisma, Zenstack
• React, NextJS, Shadcn
• Capacitor
• Google Cloud Platform - Cloud Run, Cloud Tasks, Cloud SQL Postgres, Firebase Authentication
• Vercel
• Sanity CMS
• Bugsnag
• Docker, Github Actions

Measuring success

• Immediately

• Take the lead on development of our core back-end applications and services

• Achieve a strong understanding of our product and technical roadmaps, challenging and improving these where necessary

• Deliver high-priority features from your home squad's backlog

• Understand the team's current capacity and capability to deliver high-quality, scalable back-end applications and services, identifying and making opportunities to increase these

• Establish effective ways of working with F/E leads to collaborate on an impactful, holistic engineering strategy

• Develop and maintain infrastructure and CI/CD tooling

• 6 months:

• Support engineering managers to increase our B/E and F/S engineering capacity

• Support the migration of customers from our legacy applications to our new stack

• Increase observability and data-driven decision-making capability to support our data strategy

• Find a focus on implementing core back-end features and services through increasing the capacity for F/S development in the wider team

• Champion quality engineering in our B/E applications and services

• 12 months:

_Support scaling our back-end capability through mentoring and management of junior B/E and F/S colleagues
_

Requirements

Skills needed

Non-negotiable:

• 5 years min commercial experience with Typescript at scale - preferably in a SaaS / enterprise product
• Substantial experience in a lead / senior back-end development role
• 5+ years commercial experience with JS/TS application frameworks - NestJS (preferred), Express, NextJS, NuxtJS for example
• Commercial experience of enterprise database solutions (Postgres preferred)
• Commercial experience with headless CMS solutions - Sanity (preferred), Contentful, StoryBlok etc
• Commercial experience with observability tooling - Bugsnag, DataDog, Sentry etc
• Commercial experience of developing modular applications for high availability and scale - experience in a platform / SaaS environment highly desirable
• Commercial experience provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure (GCP (preferred), Azure, AWS) maintaining infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred)
• Commercial experience developing and maintaining CI/CD tooling (Vercel, Github, Gitlab pipelines)
• Standards driven, pragmatic development approach that incorporates TDD & DDD and a consistent application of Privacy and Security by design principles

Desirable, but we can support:

• Experience of multi-tenant / SaaS applications
• Experience in a regulated / health or medical environment

Behaviours and values needed

• Comfort with technical and team leadership - able to make and communicate informed and clear technical decisions that will have long term impacts
• Sets high standards for quality, balanced with a pragmatic approach to moving at pace
• Highly collaborative - driven by team success
• Outcome focussed - you are passionate about how your work makes a positive impact on end-users; you are comfortable acting strategically as well as tactically
• Comfortable with developing both people and products - you enjoy helping your colleagues grow and are willing to support and mentor them in their development
• Confident communicator - contributing to team and wider company discussions and decision making
• Eager for opportunities to take the first steps, shape critical decisions and prepared to be accountable for the outcomes

What is next for you? _You'll join a team that is passionate about the impact it has on our end-users - children and families facing challenging health issues - making a real, positive difference in their lives._

_You'll be working in a dynamic environment, enjoying high autonomy and being accountable for decisions that shape the future and potential of Little Journey's products - you'll be laying the foundations that enable scaling and innovation in future.

You'll be a visible leader in our Product-Engineering team, empowered to build high-quality software products that meet the needs of world-leading organisations in Health Care, Life Sciences and Pharmacology.

_

Benefits

• £90-105K annual salary - depending on experience
• 28 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Pension match up to 6%
• £500 annual training budget
• £200 one off home working budget
• £50 annual wellness budget
• Flexible working within core hours (9.30am - 4pm)
• Enhanced leave policies such as maternity / paternity / family / women's health leave

About Little Journey

Little Journey was founded in 2018 by Dr Chris Evans and Sophie Copley. As an anaesthetic doctor and father himself, Chris witnessed first-hand the distress experienced by children and families coming to hospital for surgery. Partnering with Sophie, an expert in human-centred product design, they created a prototype version of the Little Journey app to support children undergoing elective surgery.

Since then, the business has accelerated quickly, having been adopted in more than 100 healthcare organisations worldwide. We also partner with leading organisations such as LEGO and top tier pharmaceutical companies. They provide us global access to paediatric services and clinical research, helping us reach more children. We received investment from internationally leading VC funds and are using this to scale further into other markets. Our technology is already available in 16 languages and counting!

Our teams are grouped into Product, Technology, Delivery, Operations, Commercial and Science departments, and we are hiring talent across all these functions to help us achieve our mission.

Diversity & Inclusion

We encourage people from all walks of life to apply and strive to eliminate unconscious bias in our recruitment process. We do not discriminate on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran or parental status or disability. We encourage candidates from underrepresented groups to apply. If you need adjustments made to our application process, to help accommodate any disabilities, please do let us know on maarty@littlejourney.health