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Product Engineer — EmpowerRD
About EmpowerRD
R&D tax credits are a powerful but underused engine for innovation and navigating them shouldn’t require an army of consultants and months of back-and-forth. At EmpowerRD, we’re changing that. We build software that makes claiming R&D tax relief seamless, transparent, and genuinely empowering for the businesses and advisors who rely on us with a vision to help every innovative company unlock the funding they deserve.
Living by that mission has been the secret to our growth, and now we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey. Every move we make has a direct impact on our customers, our product, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in understanding what drives outcomes, who challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high.
We can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out and frankly, that’s half the fun. What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind team, all committed to building the future of R&D tax relief together.
About The Role
We’re looking for a Product Engineer to join our Tech & Product team and own the features that move our platform forward.
We deliberately say Product Engineer rather than Software Developer. AI now handles much of the mechanical coding, so the value an engineer brings has shifted: to understanding the problem behind a feature, designing systems that are worth building, and making the judgement calls that AI can’t. You’ll own features end to end, from working through the problem with Product, to designing the solution, building it, and releasing it.
You’ll be building on a Ruby on Rails and Vue platform that sits at the heart of how over a thousand companies claim R&D tax relief, at a point where we’re actively modernising its architecture. There’s real design work to do here, not just feature delivery.
You’ll sit within the Technology team, reporting to the Head of Technology but working closely with Product and the other stakeholders in the business. We’re a small company, so there’s no ceiling on influence: your work is visible across the company, and your voice shapes how we build, not just what we build.
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What You’ll Be Doing
As a Product Engineer at EmpowerRD, you will:
- Own features end to end: from framing the problem with Product through to release, and following up on the impact
- Bring systems design and architectural thinking to your work: with AI doing more of the code generation, designing the right service boundaries, data models, and integrations is where engineers add the most value, and you’ll help shape how we modernise the wider platform
- Use AI tooling as a first-class part of your workflow, while owning the quality, security, and maintainability of everything that ships
- Own testing and quality for your features (we have no dedicated QA role), and work closely with Product and stakeholders, surfacing risk and trade-offs early rather than at the deadline
- Treat code review as core work, not a favour. Reviewing well is how a small team moves fast together
What You Bring
- Experience in start-up or product-driven companies
- 3+ years experience working with Ruby on Rails and a modern JS framework like React or Vue (we use Vue); more senior engineers are very welcome too
- Proficiency with relational databases like Postgres and cloud infrastructure (we use AWS & Terraform)
- Systems design ability: you can decompose a feature into well-bounded services and data models, reason about trade-offs, and explain your design decisions clearly
- Hands-on experience with AI code tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc) and, more importantly, the judgement to review, test, and own their output
- A product mindset and comfort with ambiguity: you want to understand the problem, share work-in-progress early, and prioritise outcomes and impact over output
- Strong written and verbal communication, comfortable presenting your work to technical and non-technical audiences alike
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Bonus
- Experience modernising or evolving the architecture of a long-lived platform (service extraction, API design, migrating away from a monolith)
- Experience building AI-powered product features (agents, LLM integrations) and the evaluation thinking that goes with them
- Exposure to analytics tooling (BigQuery, dbt) or event tracking
Why This Role Is a Good Fit for You
This Role Is For You If
- You want to own outcomes, not just complete tickets
- You see AI as an amplifier of your judgement, not a replacement for it
- You thrive in a fast-paced, small-team environment: variety, visibility, and a real say in where the platform goes next
This Role May Not Be For You If
- You prefer fully specced tickets handed to you, with someone else owning the design, testing, and stakeholder conversations
- You need a large team of specialists around you (dedicated QA, DevOps, front-end) to do your best work, or see code review as a chore
- You’re uncomfortable being measured on the outcomes of what you ship rather than the volume of what you write
The Interview Process
We believe in not wasting your time, so the process has just three stages:
- Intro call. A 30-minute chat with our Head of Technology to discuss the role and your background
- Product technical exercise. A small take-home task built around a realistic product problem, AI tools welcome. We’ll then meet for an interview to walk through what you built and the decisions you made, and take the problem a little further together
- Team and culture interview. A conversation with the wider team to explore how you work with others, how you’d fit with our virtues and ways of working, and for you to get a genuine feel for us too
Practical Details
- Salary will depend on your seniority and experience
- Hybrid working: two days a week in our London office
- Package includes Pension and Private Health Care
- Unfortunately we cannot offer UK Work Visa Sponsorship
- No agencies please
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