Senior software engineer (Node.js/TypeScript)

This is a flexible hybrid role requiring 1 day per week in Bath, London, or Edinburgh.

About us

Seccl is the Octopus-owned embedded investment platform that’s on a mission to helping more people to invest – and invest well.

We’re B-Corp certified with an amazing product-market fit, impressive early traction and the potential to transform an outdated industry, for the better. We've been growing fast and will scale even faster over the next few years.

We’re also proud to be part of Octopus, the £multi billion group that's on a mission to breathe new life into broken industries, through companies like Octopus Energy, Octopus Investments and Octopus Money.

Check out the Seccl website for the latest on our products and our mission to shape the future of investments.

Our culture:

Never settle – We think of ourselves as ‘embedded hero-makers’ for our customers. We put them first, and if we say we’ll do something, we’ll move heaven and earth to do it. We think boldly and embrace change.

Take ownership - We think rigorously and deeply about a problem, but then charge at it, acting with and urgency and speed that sets us apart. But we never lose sight of quality or long-term scalability.

Be generous & candid - We encourage our people – and our customers – to challenge us and never shy away from tough conversations. We have a flat and inclusive culture where everyone can be themselves – and speak up.

Check out our Glassdoor page for the latest reviews or our LinkedIn for company updates and insights from the team.

Our engineering ways of working:

• Our Product and Engineering organisation is structured into four tribes: Custody, Accounts, Experience, and Cloud & Security. Each tribe contains multiple autonomous squads, with clear full ownership over specific product domains.

• The squads are intentionally small and cross-functional, typically made up of an Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and 3–5 engineers with complementary skills aligned to the domain they own.

• We operate in a build-and-run model, with teams responsible for the full software lifecycle, from architecture and delivery through to operational support and incident management.

• Our core platform is built on AWS serverless technologies including Lambda, SQS, EventBridge, API Gateway, S3, and ECS. We primarily develop in TypeScript and Node.js, with MongoDB as our primary document database. We also have a small number of C# services and are continuing to evolve our platform architecture, including expanding our use of ECS Fargate.

• Infrastructure is managed through a combination of Terraform and Serverless Framework. We use GitHub Actions for CI/CD and incident.io to support our incident management processes and operational workflows.

• We care deeply about engineering quality, pragmatic architecture, and continuous improvement. If you’d like to go deeper, we’re happy to share more about our engineering practices and technology radar during the interview process.

The role

As an engineer at Seccl you will design, build and operate reliable and scalable, testable and maintainable software solutions, building new functionalities and products using Typescript and Node.js. You play a key role in our software development and have a hands-on approach throughout the development process supporting resilient financial workflow systems and regulated investment operations. As a senior member of the team, you are the ‘go-to’ person for queries.

On a typical day you will…

• Work collaboratively in a domain aligned cross-functional squad made up of engineers and product along with colleagues from customer-facing and operations teams

• Design, implement and operate your services within your domain

• Be accountable for the SLAs of your products and iterative improvements

• Maintain and extend documentation for your services

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and technical excellence while understanding when “good enough for now” is appropriate

• Provide guidance and mentorship for other engineers

• Communicate with non-technical colleagues to answer queries about the Seccl system

What you need…

• To own your services from design to operation. We operate a build-and-run model where engineers have autonomy but full accountability.

• We care deeply about correctness, resilience and operational excellence because our systems underpin real customer investments.

• Engineers are not passengers in their products but champions. Drive improvements and features while collaborating openly with product, operations and engineering colleagues, challenging ideas constructively and focusing on delivering the best outcomes for customers.

• Have a strong ability to understand business and customer problems and turn them into efficient, scalable solutions. Be curious about how investment and custody products operate, and pragmatic in balancing customer value, operational correctness, engineering quality and long-term scalability.

• Experience building financial systems with multi-region, multi-currency or trading-related complexity would be advantageous.

• Experience in a strongly/statically typed language.

• Have a strong understanding of designing, building, and running high-quality, standards-compliant workflow APIs, with a focus on testing, observability, and performance.

• Have worked with a cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP). We use AWS.

• Have worked with distributed systems and are comfortable debugging through tracing and observability.

• Willing to be on-call for your services.

Core technical skills you must have:

• Strong commercial experience with Node.js, specifically TypeScript

• Experience with Amazon Web Services

• Experience with Serverless products

• Experience with document databases, ideally MongoDB

• Experience mentoring engineers

• Experience leading technical delivery in a build-and-run engineering model

• Experience in a structured on-call process and incident management

• Experience working in regulated industries, ideally financial services or FinTech.

This role isn’t for you if...

• You rely on a lot of top-down direction. Here, you’ll have a lot of freedom and ownership of your role, and you’ll be expected to shape your own progression, bring forward ideas, and spot opportunities to improve bring forward ideas, and spot opportunities to improve

• You’re not comfortable working in a fast-paced environment. Our speed and scalability are what set us apart; you need to be able to act quickly and think on your feet

• You struggle to follow through on ideas. We value people who do what they say they will. If you care about something, you have the freedom here to make it happen

• You don’t like change. You’ll get on great here if you relish the ambiguity of rapid growth and are willing to embrace uncertainty

What’s in it for you…

We offer a generous mix of benefits for the things that really matter to our people, including:

Base salary based on experience and skills demonstrated during our assessment phase

🌴 27 days holiday + bank holidays (some can be flexible) + day off on your birthday + three days (full time) per year for Dependant leave

💙 Two volunteering days per year

🏅 Length of service award – one month paid sabbatical at eight years

✅ 6% employer pension contribution, and life assurance

🏥 Private medical insurance with AXA Health

👪 Enhanced Parental leave

💻 MacBook and up to £500 home office set up budget

📖 £750 per person learning budget

🌎 Option to work abroad for up to six weeks a year

🌻 Health and wellbeing initiatives including free therapy via Wellness Cloud, mental health support via Headspace

🌱 Strong financial wellbeing focus including access to Octopus Money, Octopus Share Incentive Plan and will writing offering via Octopus Legacy

🎁 Perkbox – Flexi-points giving you a range of discounts and perks including free weekly coffee, gym and retail discounts

🚲 Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work and Octopus Electric Vehicle Leasing

Interview process

Interviewing is a two-way thing, and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you. Our interviews are conversational, so come with questions and be curious. In general, you can expect the interview process to look a bit like this:

• Talent screen - 30 min intro call with our Talent partner or an Engineering manager

• Technical loop - 2.45h virtual technical assessment with 3 core components - system design, bar raiser round and TypeScript code review with breaks between the stages. You will receive preparation materials for the round and more information on how to prepare.

⏳ We’ll only close this role once we have enough applications for the next stage. Please submit your application as soon as possible to make sure you don’t miss out and you should expect to hear back from us within one to two weeks of applying.

🌈 Our aim is to build a diverse and inclusive company of awesome people, with unique skills, passions and experiences. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.

If this sounds like your kind of thing, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t tick every box. We’d love to hear from you!

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