Software Engineer

Location Hybrid London, UK 2 days/week in our London office

Salary £60,000 - £70,000 (GBP) compensation benchmarking powered by Figures

Seniority Mid-level

Perks and benefits

Work from home option

Employee Assistance Programme

Enhanced maternity and paternity leave

Paid emergency leave

Mentoring/coaching

Salary sacrifice

Team lunches

Cycle to work scheme

Free fruit

Free soft drinks

Candidate happiness

8.19 (742)

Job Description Overview

Reporting to: Staff/Senior engineer in one of our product squads

Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application. UK national or visa holder preferred, but not a dealbreaker.

Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history and right to work.

You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by: 14 days from application submission.

Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we'd welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

Role

Why we're hiring

Summary of the role - You'll join one of our cross-functional product squads as a Full Stack Engineer, working on user-facing features end-to-end using TypeScript, React/Next.js and Node/NestJS. You'll pair with senior engineers, contribute meaningfully from day one, and grow towards becoming a domain owner.

Impact of the role on our mission - This role strengthens our ability to ship features rapidly and reliably to public servants and policymakers. Success is measured by your ability to:

Contribute production-quality code across the stack.

Help your squad ship well-tested, maintainable features on schedule.

Improve team velocity by reducing handoff friction and increasing ownership.

Team Tasks and remit

You'll work in a feature squad, alongside 2-3 senior engineers, a PM and a designer. Day-to-day, you'll:

Build and test new product features (both frontend and backend).

Participate in squad ceremonies and architectural discussions.

Refactor, maintain and document shared components and services.

Be mentored and mentor others - this is a two-way learning environment.

This role is exciting if you're eager to grow technically and professionally in a supportive, pragmatic team. You'll be empowered to own code, propose improvements and understand how your work impacts our users.

You will be doing:

Writing TypeScript across the stack

Building APIs, UI components and end-to-end tests

Learning from senior engineers and shaping our engineering practices

You won't be doing:

Managing people

Writing throwaway code

Timelines may vary depending on individual onboarding and support needs, but we expect most team members to achieve the following milestones:

Within one month, you will

Ship a non-trivial PR to production with guidance.

Pass all dev-environment setup, CI, and test suite hurdles.

Join squad rituals and build context on our products and tech stack.

Within three months, you will

Own and deliver scoped features independently.

Collaborate closely with designers and PMs on UX delivery.

Contribute to team retros and identify ways to improve squad flow.

Within six months, you will

Be a go-to person for part of our system (e.g. a module or feature).

Mentor newer engineers or interns.

Propose and lead a technical improvement (e.g. test coverage, DX).

About you

This is a great fit if you

Enjoy being hands-on with a focus on writing clean, scalable code.

Relish the fast pace and exploratory nature of a startup environment.

Like working full-stack and improving at both ends.

Want to be part of building a strong, kind engineering culture.

Are comfortable receiving feedback and keen to grow quickly.

Let us know if you have

Built or maintained production-grade React/NestJS systems.

Worked in a mono-repo or on Nx/PNPM tooling.

Contributed to a high-quality codebase (test coverage, type-safety, linting).

Worked on teams with accessibility or localisation goals.

Have experience and/or interest in system security

This likely won't be the right role if you

Need extensive structure or a narrow, fixed role.

Are not flexible with regards to working on frontend vs. backend.

Are looking for big-tech company, fixed processes, or large teams.

Have a minimal interest in coding to high production standards.

Minimal interest in team collaboration and knowledge sharing

Prefer novelty over practicality in technical decision making.

Don't meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application

The Applied platform asks some demographic questions before you start your application. No one at Apolitical sees the answers to these demographic questions with your application. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We're excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.

Stages in our hiring process:

Pairing exercise 60m on Google Meet . During this session, you will work through frontend & backend tasks with two engineers on the team. The goal of this session is to assess your problem solving skills and ability to communicate.

Technical discussion 60m + 10m Q&A in London Office . We ask you scenario-based questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for the role. It's an opportunity to meet some of the people you might end up working with, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about the team and role.

Chief Executive interview 30m in London Office . In this final interview, members of the C-level team build on conversations you've had with other team members to learn about your motivations and drivers at work and within the Apolitical context.

Note, we are open to scheduling the the final two, on-site interviews on the same day with a 15-30m break between.