Kew Reach
Senior Software Engineer
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Senior Software Engineer - Product & Platform
Company
Kew Reach
Product
Palette; an urban planning tool for biodiversity and resilience gain
Location
UK-based · remote-first or hybrid options available (where remote-first, occasional London/team days are required)
Reports to
CEO
About Kew Reach
A better future for people and planet, made possible through the power of a thriving and resilient natural world.
Launched in 2024, Kew Reach is a joint venture with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, set up to deliver nature-based solutions to restore ecosystems in any setting. We accelerate nature-positive action at scale, grounded in scientific expertise, creative thinking and collaboration. We put the knowledge of more than 500 scientists and a global network of specialists into the hands of professionals shaping the built and natural environment, helping them make defensible, climate-resilient decisions about nature restoration, from ecosystem regeneration to urban development.
What We Do
We offer an end-to-end service guided by the Kew Method, spanning baseline assessment, climate-informed design and delivery, species sourcing, long-term monitoring and capacity building, ensuring every project is credible, resilient and delivers measurable nature gain. This spans three Labs: the City Lab, bringing climate-resilient planting and green infrastructure into cities; the Restoration Lab, turning degraded land into resilient, biodiverse ecosystems; and the Infrastructure Lab, delivering nature-based solutions for major capital projects. Capacity building runs through all three, equipping local teams and institutions to sustain nature-positive action after handover.
Behind all of it: 500+ Kew scientists, 400 collaborating institutes across 100 countries, and 260 years of botanical research.
Introducing Palette
Our platform, Palette, brings that same scientific confidence to decisions about planting, biodiversity and habitat. Built around our climate-resilient tree species-selection tools, we're expanding its capabilities to cover pollinator and habitat analysis, combined biodiversity planning and tools for local-authority use. We build Palette for the people making these decisions: engineering and environmental consultancies, architecture and landscape architecture practices, and the public sector.
The Role
You will be the engineer who owns the health and growth of the platform: its security, reliability and deployment pipeline, day-to-day usability, and the new client-facing capabilities we build. As those capabilities grow, you'll mature the platform from a single application into a suite of centrally managed tools. You'll work alongside our Senior Data Scientist, who owns the scientific data pipeline and modelling, and the CEO.
This is a founding platform-engineer role: broad, high-ownership and, for now, the sole engineer on the platform side. You'll turn client needs and our domain expertise into features, not just keep the lights on. It suits someone who wants the autonomy and scope of an early hire and is comfortable being the person the platform depends on.
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What You'll Own
Product & Platform Evolution
- Grow the platform beyond its first study, turning client needs and scientific expertise into features that help users understand their sites and act on that understanding.
- Work directly with users and the CEO to shape the roadmap: discover, prototype, ship, measure and iterate.
- Design features that generalise across our Urban, Infrastructure and Restoration use cases.
- Extend the data and API surface alongside the data engineer. They own the science; you own how it becomes a usable, reliable product experience, including geospatial tools, maps, exports, reporting and integrations.
- Balance new-feature delivery with platform hardening and reliability.
Security & Compliance
- Take our launch security checklist from "mostly coded" to verified and deployed, including WAF rollout, security response headers/CSP and CloudFront.
- Harden authentication and sessions (WorkOS/AuthKit), including shorter-lived tokens, server-side session revocation, cookie/redirect security and MFA/SSO.
- Drive secret hygiene, including git-history scanning, rotation and AWS Secrets Manager.
- Keep the CI dependency-audit gate green and stay ahead of new advisories.
- Stand up account-level detection through CloudTrail, GuardDuty and AWS Config.
- Support UK data-residency requirements and help assemble the evidence required for enterprise/public-sector procurement.
Reliability & Operations
- Own the AWS infrastructure (CDK, ECS Fargate, RDS PostgreSQL + PostGIS, ALB, Route 53, S3) and keep environments clean and reproducible.
- Improve observability through CloudWatch and Sentry, with alerting on error rate, latency and saturation and clearly defined SLOs.
- Own the GitHub Actions deployment pipeline and ensure safe rollouts, tested rollbacks and verified DB migrations.
- Run an RDS restore drill and enable credential rotation safely.
- Keep infrastructure spend right-sized.
Usability & Frontend Quality
- Improve performance, accessibility, responsiveness, error states and overall product polish.
- Build out the multi-tenant/org-first surface: organisations, roles, seats and tiers.
- Strengthen input validation, error handling and rate limiting across the tRPC API.
- Keep the React 19/Tailwind/shadcn frontend maintainable and consistent.
Engineering Practice
- Uphold our test discipline: every new backend procedure ships with happy-path and error-path tests.
- Keep architecture documented via ADRs and runbooks current.
- Work through small, reviewable PRs; deploy to staging, validate, then prod.
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Where We Are Today
You'd be walking into a platform already well past prototype:
- Live product with ~320 species scored across 12 UK regions.
- Stack: React 19 · Tailwind 4 · Wouter · shadcn/ui · Vite; Express 4 · tRPC 11 · TypeScript · Drizzle ORM; PostgreSQL 16 + PostGIS.
- Services: WorkOS AuthKit · Postmark · HubSpot · S3/MinIO · Google Maps Platform · SQS.
- Hosting: AWS ECS Fargate in eu-west-2 behind an ALB.
- Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK in TypeScript with separate dev/staging/prod stacks.
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions with keyless OIDC deploys; staging on merge to main, prod on tag with manual approval.
- Observability: Sentry and CloudWatch dashboards.
- Quality: ~380 tests across ~39 suites and a genuine "untested code doesn't merge" culture.
- Documentation: working conventions, phased build plan, seven ADRs, launch security checklist and deployment/bootstrap runbooks.
- First-quarter backlog: deploy WAF and CloudFront; finish security headers/CSP; harden sessions; purge and rotate historical secrets; enable CloudTrail/GuardDuty/Config; verify RDS encryption and rotation; run a restore drill; and commission a pre-launch penetration test.
Essential Experience
- Strong TypeScript across the stack, including Node.js backends and modern React.
- Solid AWS experience and comfort with infrastructure as code (CDK ideally; Terraform/Pulumi transfers).
- Application and cloud security knowledge: OWASP fundamentals, auth/session design, secret management, TLS/headers/CSP, WAF and least-privilege IAM.
- Experience running production web services: CI/CD, containers, observability, incident handling and safe database migrations.
- Relational databases (PostgreSQL) and an ORM such as Drizzle, Prisma or TypeORM.
- A test-first instinct and bias toward small, reviewable changes.
- Product sense and a track record of building and shipping user-facing features, from understanding the need through to iteration with users.
Desirable
- tRPC, Drizzle, WorkOS or similar identity platforms.
- PostGIS/geospatial data.
- Multi-tenant SaaS.
- Experience selling into UK public sector/enterprise environments.
- Frontend accessibility and performance (Core Web Vitals, WCAG).
- Interactive maps/geospatial UX, such as Google Maps Platform, Leaflet, Mapbox or deck.gl.
- A genuine interest in trees, urban greening, biodiversity and climate resilience.
This is not a data-science or modelling role. The scientific data pipeline, species envelopes and suitability methodology are owned by our data engineer. You'll integrate with that work and turn it into product, but you won't build the models yourself. Your focus is the platform and its product: security, stability, usability and the capabilities we grow on top.
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