Senior Product Engineer (Hiring Immediately)

Senior Product Engineer

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Backend & Architecture focus · AI-native builder · Individual contributor

Location: London – Hybrid · Salary: £70,000–£90,000 + equity (EMI options) · Reports to: Founders

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Product Engineer who thrives in the new world of software development – strong backend and architecture instincts paired with AI-native fluency to ship real product, fast. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor builder role: a doer with genuine ownership of both technology and product.

You'll report to the founders as a senior engineer – hands-on with code every day while shaping architecture, infrastructure and engineering standards. This is an ownership role, not a ticket-completion role: you investigate the real problem, decide what should change, recommend the fix and ship it, using modern AI tooling to move faster than a traditional team can. You'll have real influence across product and technology, and direct access to customers and founders.

About us

Placed is a talent attraction platform built for quality hiring at scale, helping employers optimise recruitment spend for candidate quality with a recognised brand and a validated product. You'd be joining:

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• A well-funded business already established across three countries.
  
• A well-known brand with loyal enterprise customers.
  
• A validated product, with direct access to customer feedback shaping what we build next.
  
• A close-knit, founder-led team that values trust, autonomy and pragmatism.
  

Because the team is small and senior, individual engineers have outsized impact – which is exactly why ownership matters so much in this role.

What you'll own

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• Backend & architecture. Design, build and evolve the services, APIs, data pipelines and scoring/recommendation logic at the core of the product – owning architecture, infrastructure, schema design, engineering standards and the trade-offs that come with them, all hands-on.
  
• End-to-end delivery. Take initiatives from concept to release – investigating issues, separating data problems from spec gaps, recommending the fix, building, testing and following through. You own the outcome, not just the ticket.
  
• Product Roadmap Execution. Translate commercial and product strategy into scalable, high-quality technical delivery.
  
• Reliability. Keep core pipelines and infrastructure healthy (cloud, CI/CD, containerised deployments), treating production stability and data integrity as part of the job.
  

What we're looking for
Must-haves

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• Strong full-stack / backend engineering. 5+ years of professional software development (stack flexible) with strong server-side fundamentals – API design, data modelling/schema design, authentication patterns and clean service architecture. Comfortable across SQL databases and a modern backend stack (e.g. Python, Node/TypeScript).
  
• Real builder, full ownership. A track record of shipping features end-to-end in a fast-moving environment and owning the outcome. You investigate, recommend and decide – you don't stop at describing what the system does today.
  
• AI-native ways of working. You already build with AI coding tools (e.g. Claude, Cursor, Copilot) as a core part of your workflow – staying in architectural control while moving fast. Integrating LLM APIs into product is a strong plus.
  
• Autonomy & bias to ship. You operate independently and drive work to done without hand-holding – you'd rather be building than managing. This is a senior IC role: depth and delivery, not headcount.
  
• Product & commercial sense. You understand how technology drives customer value, weigh speed vs quality sensibly, and make progress without perfect information.
  
• Communication. Clear, structured communicator who can bridge technical and commercial perspectives, explain trade-offs, and quickly understand a problem domain.
  

Nice-to-haves

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• Event-driven architectures and high-volume data pipelines.
  

Why this role

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• Rare influence across both product and technology, with the stability of an established business and real recurring revenue.
  
• Direct collaboration with the founders – no heavy bureaucracy.
  
• A pure builder role: maximum impact and ownership, no management overhead.
  

Hiring process

1. 
   
2. Screening call (~30 min). Assess communication and comprehension – can you quickly understand a problem, ask the right questions, and explain your thinking? We're listening for ownership and judgement: do you take the problem on, or just describe it?
   
3. Practical task with AI (~60 min). A real, scoped problem you tackle using Claude / AI tooling. We want to see how you break work down, use AI to move fast, keep architectural control, and separate a data issue from a spec gap. Reasoning out loud matters as much as the output.
   
4. Technical conversation (~45 min). A deeper discussion of backend and architecture experience, real problems you've solved, and how you think about trade-offs – testing depth and whether you own decisions or just describe systems.
   
5. Final conversation. xkybehq Meet the founders – ways of working, ambition, and fit with a small, senior team.