[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @Ably (UK)

Role Description

Ably's back office platform is where every customer account is managed. It holds the packages, entitlements and limits that determine what each of our customers can do, and it runs the tooling our Finance, Customer Success and Support teams rely on every day.

This is an opportunity to take ownership of a platform the whole business depends on, with the scope to decide how it should work rather than maintain someone else's decisions. You'll be hands-on across entitlements, administration tooling and billing, working closely with our Head of Infrastructure and our Developer Experience team, and directly with the teams who use what you build.

We work in an AI-first engineering culture: AI tools are part of how we plan, prototype, and iterate, though engineers own every technical decision, and human judgment is the quality bar that everything is measured against.

Day to day you will

• Run the back office platform.
• Look after the systems holding every customer's packages, entitlements, limits and billing, along with the tooling Finance, Customer Success and Support use daily.
• Solve problems, not tickets.
• Make admin work for the people who use it.
• Partner across the company.
• Champion AI-assisted development.
• Make the systems explain themselves.
• Set the testing bar.

Qualifications

• Experience working in large, established codebases, and the judgement to tell when a system should be extended, reworked, or replaced outright.
• A track record of shaping architecture inside a system you inherited.
• The ability to self-start, work through ambiguity, and make good decisions without a lot of hand-holding.
• An AI-first mindset.
• Experience making systems observable and testable.

Requirements

• Ruby on Rails experience is beneficial, though we care more about your range than any one language.
• Experience of usage-based billing systems, whether built in-house or on a platform such as Orb, Metronome, or Chargebee.
• A background in platform or internal tooling teams rather than product teams.
• Experience being the engineer accountable for a system rather than one contributor among many.

Benefits

• A remote-first and flexible work environment.
• Equity through our EMI share options programme.
• Enhanced holiday allowance: 28 days of paid annual leave.
• Enhanced parental leave: up to 16 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers.
• A home workstation budget of £500 on joining, and £150 per year after that.
• A personal learning and development budget of £1000 a year, plus 5% L&D time during working hours.
• Private healthcare with BUPA.
• A medical cash plan covering a range of medical and dental costs.
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
• A monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
• Life assurance and income protection.
• Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes.
• A weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week "Need to Know" meeting.
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.