Principal Software Engineer

At Freetrade, we believe investing should be open to everyone. It's one of the best ways to grow your savings, but for a lot of people, investing seems complicated, expensive and out of reach. We want to change all that, which is why we're on a mission to get everyone investing!

We're a technology company that brings simple, free stock investing to all. We've built a beautiful investing app to trade in real shares, with zero commissions in a fluid, mobile-first experience. We're not building an app for day-trading. We will never offer things like leveraged derivatives which are proven to lose the majority of customers their money. We're building an app that can offer the means to achieve better, long-term financial outcomes and maybe even help chip away at one of the biggest issues of this generation; financial inequality.

As the first challenger stockbroker to disrupt the £1.2 trillion UK retail investment market, we're poised to expand into Europe in 2021, with a Headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. Our Series A funding round was led by Draper Esprit and complimented by our summer 2020 crowdfunding round in which we raised £7m. This brings our total funding to £24m so far and we're just getting started. We have also successfully launched various new revenue streams over the past few months, including our premium 'Plus' membership and SIPPs (Self Invested Personal Pensions).

We are on track to double in size from 120 people to 200+ by the end of the year. Our customer numbers are 450,000 and counting, and we are receiving upwards of 4,000 new customer sign ups per day as of January 2021.

Our technology teams, across software engineering and product, are the beating heart of our mission. The teams work in collaborative verticals to build our platform. This means customers can put their savings to work in the global markets via a product and user experience they can trust, which currently enables 50,000 - 100,000 trades per day.

About the role:

We are looking for an amazing Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for an entire business area. You will be designing, releasing and scaling high complexity, business critical features!

Responsibilities:

• Be pragmatic and technology agnostic, choosing the right tool for each job. You're excited to work with our modern serverless stack, but you realise that tech choices like this are just a means to an end.
• Own and be responsible for the end to end process for development projects and new features from design to post production, including having the capability for accurate software validation.
• Significantly contribute to the architectural direction of your area of the Freetrade product, influencing business outcomes by introducing improved solutions.
• Be the go-to person for resolving complex issues with unfamiliar systems and codebases, acting as a subject matter expert in your given area.
• Constantly be looking to share knowledge with the wider team and actively lifting the skills and expertise of those around you.
• Be an excellent judge of future talent for Freetrade, helping us achieve our bold expansion objectives by leading technical interviews and ensuring that we are always raising the bar.

About you:

• You have successfully delivered highly complex, scalable business critical software that is used by 1000s of end users.
• You are highly proficient within multiple areas of engineering with the versatility to understand the wider business challenges.
• You care deeply about making a significant positive impact and creating a world-class, disruptive product.
• You're team-oriented, keen to share your knowledge and open to giving (and receiving) continuous feedback.
• You have a keen eye for detail, spotting opportunities for improvement, and are willing to take the lead on projects that unblock the wider team.

Our environment:

We use serverless technologies such as Firestore, Cloud Composer, and Stackdriver, to build a reliable and performant platform. We use the real-time database, cloud functions and other features like pub/sub to provide a frictionless investment platform.

This is a high visibility environment where you will make a direct positive impact on customer experience and the business. If you enjoy broadening your technical skills, building a new product, and working in an environment that thrives on creativity, experimentation, and innovation, then this is the job for you!

Our hiring process is programming language and framework agnostic, operating on the principle that strong engineers can pick up new technologies quickly with appropriate guidance. We don't require prospective hires to be well versed in all of the technologies we use but we do require them to be willing and eager to learn all areas of our stack.

• Annual bonus
• Private healthcare
• Macbook
• Private pension
• Freetrade plus account
• SIPP account
• £200 to go into your GIA
• Bonus scheme
• Life assurance
• Cycle to work

• Recruiter phone screen
• HM interview
• Values
• Tech tests coding loop/system design
• Exec final