Senior Back-End Software Engineer Four Day Week

Senior Back-End Software Engineer

We’re looking for an incredible back-end software engineer who can help us to develop the platform for our world-class product for modern charities.

At Beacon we’re a growing technology startup building the best nonprofit-focused CRM in the world. We passionately believe in the power of technology to make a difference.

Chris and David, both software engineers, founded Beacon in 2017 to build a new kind of charity CRM using the latest technology and design principles.

Now over 1600 innovative charities around the world trust Beacon to run their core technology infrastructure. Animal welfare, human rights, disaster relief, cancer support – all powered by Beacon. You can see a quick demo of our product, here.

We have doing good at the core of our mission, but we’re also profitable, privately owned, and our goals are for long term sustainable growth – not making a quick buck for venture capitalists.

At Beacon we take building exceptional software very seriously. In a recent survey by Fundraising magazine we were rated 4.9/5 on functionality and 4.9/5 on ease of use – we want to keep it that way!

Our technology stack is built around Serverless architectures running on AWS and GCP. We use a combination of Lambdas and Google Cloud Run both running Node to power our backend. All new services are written using TypeScript, and we’re big advocates. We use a range of data stores in the backend, choosing the right tools for the job where relevant. These include Postgres, Google Spanner and BigQuery. We’re continually refining and optimising our databases for scalability and performance.

Responsibilities

• You will be driving the development of the Back-End of the Beacon product, with a focus on building scalable systems that power the rest of the stack. You’ll work directly with the founders and our existing engineering team to design, develop, and maintain a sophisticated and modern web application’s infrastructure.
• Focusing on the development and scaling of Beacon’s database infrastructure, using Amazon RDS, Google BigQuery and Google Spanner.
• Driving the innovation and scalability of Beacon’s whole cloud-based infrastructure, including queues, caches, and system monitoring and alerting tools.
• Working closely with other engineers to come up with creative and innovative solutions to challenging technical problems.
• Making use of the latest tools where appropriate. We work with AI tooling to aid developer workflows.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of relevant experience with – and a passion for – using TypeScript on the Back-End to build the infrastructure that supports beautiful desktop web applications.
• Practical experience with Serverless architectures (Lambda or Google Cloud Run).
• You’ll have worked closely with databases, fine tuning them for performance and stability.
• You deeply understand the challenges involved with scaling out distributed systems and can talk to why things like queues, caches, and effective monitoring are all important.
• Proficient with the different types of persistence stores (Redis, Object storage, MySql etc) and when to use one over another.

Benefits

• Our customers are all charities – you’ll get to build your career whilst having a genuinely positive impact on the world
• Four day work week. Our working model gives everyone a 3 day weekend, every week.
• We’ll give you 6 weeks (24 days) of holiday every year, plus bank holidays
• 6 week fully paid sabbatical every 5 years
• Taking time off is important. And we really mean it: We’ll pay you a £60 bonus for every day of holiday you take
• Banded salary system so that everyone is paid the same for doing the same job, and compensation growth within the organisation is clear.
• Guaranteed pay rise to adjust for inflation every 12 months
• EMI-qualifying share options – you get to own a piece of the company
• Beacon is climate positive (beyond carbon neutral), so your employment won’t hurt the planet. Learn more
• A proper pension – we’ll match 150% of your pension contributions (up to 10%)
• Private health insurance with routine dental & optical cover
• Modern parental leave policy (12 weeks at full pay, and it’s the same for everyone, regardless of gender or circumstances)
• Cycle to work scheme

Working together

As a team we prefer to be together in our office (4-6 New Inn Broadway, London, EC2A 3PR) and we’d want you to join us – so this is not a remote role. We offer flexible working hours and while your usual place of work will be with us in the office, you can work home when you need to.

We passionately believe in doing our part to address the tech sector’s diversity problem

We believe that in building diversity we build strength.

We encourage everyone with the required skills to apply, we consider building a diverse and representative team to be critical to our success, and we actively pursue building a more diverse team.

We have a banded salary system to ensure that nobody is paid differently for the same role. Salaries across the organisation, including executive pay, are entirely transparent.

Our parental leave policy provides for 12 weeks of full pay, and can be taken by any parent, regardless of their new parenting circumstances.