Opus 2
Senior Software Engineer
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Senior Engineer at Opus 2
Senior engineering at Opus 2 is hands-on, high-trust, and end-to-end. You'll lead complex, often ambiguous work from problem to production, raise the bar on the team around you, and help shape how we build software in a moment where AI is changing the work week to week. We're not looking for someone who'll watch that change from the sidelines.
You can grow toward Staff or Principal from here. This is an IC role, and the day-to-day is engineering with influence, not management.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead complex, often ambiguous features and projects end-to-end. Discovery, breakdown, shipping in slices, and seeing it land for customers.
- Partner with Product and Design to translate user needs into pragmatic, well-scoped technical work. Call tradeoffs early. Keep the roadmap honest about what's feasible.
- Raise the bar on the team around you, and beyond. Thoughtful code review, pairing where it helps, mentoring mid-level and junior engineers. The kind of "shows the team what good looks like" presence that compounds over time and gets noticed across squads beyond your own.
- Own quality and operability. CI/CD, test automation, observability, post-incident learning. Part of the work, not someone else's job.
- Make architectural and tech-stack calls that hold up. Favour maintainable, scalable, simple solutions over clever ones, and design with operability and change in mind.
- Use AI to raise quality, speed, and productivity. You don't need to be an ML researcher, but you should be using AI tools well across the SDLC: in your own workflow, in product exploration, and in helping the squad adopt them safely.
- Help shape engineering strategy with Tech Leads and Engineering Managers. Architecture, scalability, how the team works, where we invest.
The Shape We're Hiring For
We're hiring T-shaped engineers: broad across the stack, deep in at least one area (backend, frontend, data, infra, AI/ML, or another domain where you can show real expertise). We care more about how you think than how many tools you've used.
Attributes
- Depth in something. You can name a domain where you're the person colleagues come to.
- Breadth that lets you ship end-to-end. "That's not my layer" isn't in your vocabulary when a feature spans frontend, API, data, and deployment.
- Ownership that runs from idea to production and into how it operates. You're accountable for outcomes, not just output, and you don't drop work at the merge button.
- Steadiness under pressure. You're a stabilising presence when delivery is uncertain or the goal is moving: calm, structured, and clear about what's known.
- Coaching disposition. You explain things clearly, give review feedback that grows people, and lift the team's median rather than just its peak. You also receive feedback without defensiveness and treat it as fuel for visible growth.
- Change disposition. You treat the AI-driven shift in software as the job rather than disruption to it. You learn fast, change your mind when the evidence does, and help colleagues do the same.
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You'll Be a Strong Fit If
- You've shipped, operated, and iterated on real software at meaningful scale. Not just built it, but lived with it.
- You're comfortable across the stack with at least one of: TypeScript, Python, Java, or Go.
- You've worked with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; transferable experience welcome) and understand the operational side of running services in production.
- You enjoy working with Product and Design as partners who shape what gets built, rather than as a service desk that hands you tickets.
- You're curious about AI tooling and product applications, and you want to help build a learning culture rather than wait for a training catalogue.
You Might Be a Less Good Fit If
- You want to specialise narrowly and not branch outside your home stack.
- You'd prefer fully-specified tickets you can implement without much conversation.
- You'd rather not spend time growing colleagues. At this level, that's a core part of seniority.
- You're sceptical of AI tooling on principle and would rather wait to see whether it settles before engaging. At this level we expect you to be helping the squad work out what good looks like.
- You find rapid change in tools and ways of working draining rather than energising.
- You're looking for a fast track to management. This role is about technical growth.
How We Work
- Strong ownership. Squads own their products end-to-end, from the customer outcome through to operating them in production.
- Pragmatic engineering. We favour simple, testable solutions over premature abstraction. We use data where it informs a real decision.
- A learning and improvement culture. We're building an engineering organisation that learns and adapts at the pace AI is forcing on the work. That's the bar for hiring, growth, and how we run the team.
- Coaching as part of seniority. Senior engineers help juniors, mid-levels, and each other grow. We protect that time on calendars.
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A Work in Progress
Opus 2 is in real transition. AI is reshaping how our customers work and how we build software, and we're investing in the engineering organisation to keep pace. Some of that is already settled; other parts are still being shaped.
If you want a fully paved path, this isn't it yet. If you want to be an agent of change in a team that's clear about where it's going and pragmatic about how to get there, there's real leverage here. We're hiring people who'll help us shape this, not just slot into it.
Tech You'll Work With
- Backend: Python, Go, TypeScript (where we're investing); Java and PHP (established services)
- Frontend: React
- Deployment: Kubernetes primary; serverless where it's the better fit
- Cloud: AWS
- Data: Postgres, MongoDB, OpenSearch / Elasticsearch, vector stores
- AI: GenAI features already in production (LLMs, retrieval, agentic workflows), with more on the way
You don't need to know all of these on day one. You should be ready to learn what you don't.
Working for Opus 2
- Senior engineering work at a company where AI is real, in production, and a core part of how customers get value. Not a side-of-desk experiment.
- A focused engineering organisation where your work is visible, your decisions matter, and the path from idea to customer is short.
- Investment in your growth: coaching, learning time, exposure to challenging problems, and a clear IC track if you want to keep deepening technically.
- Contributory pension plan.
- 33 days annual holidays, flexible working, and length of service entitlement.
- Health Insurance.
- Loyalty Share Scheme.
- Enhanced Maternity and Paternity.
- Employee Assistance Programme.
- Electric Vehicle Salary Sacrifice.
- Cycle to Work Scheme.
- Calm and Mindfulness sessions.
- A day of leave to volunteer for charity or dependent day.
- Regular Company Social Events.
- Yearly Development Retreat.
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