The Insights Family
Staff Engineer
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The Insights Family
The Insights Family is the world's largest dedicated source of intelligence on kids, teens, and families. We track the attitudes, behaviours, and consumption patterns of millions of young people across 22+ markets, delivering data and analysis to clients across media, entertainment, intellectual property, licensing, sports franchises, and the toys and games industry. Having established a strong and stable client base, our focus is now on sustainable growth: deepening the value we deliver to existing clients and expanding our reach through genuinely better products. That means enhancing how we deliver data, insights, and analytics through Web Apps, AI Agents and Assistants, MCPs, and APIs. Engineering is central to that ambition. We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join as our most senior individual contributor: someone who sets technical direction, raises the standard of how we build, and makes the whole team faster without needing a management title to do it. For an exceptional candidate, the scope and title can flex to Principal.
This is a hands-on role. You'll write code, own architectural decisions, and lead by example. You'll bring the experience to know when to move fast and when to be careful, and the credibility to get others aligned on that distinction. You won't manage people, but you will shape how they work, what they build on, and where the bar sits.
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We've embraced modern AI-assisted development as a genuine productivity multiplier. We want someone who has, too, and who can actively help the team get more out of it. You'll have a real frontier-model budget and we expect you to tear into it.
- Own architectural decisions across our product and data platform: establishing patterns, reviewing designs, and ensuring that what we build today doesn't become tomorrow's debt
- Ship code yourself, using AI tooling and modern development practices to move fast without compromising quality
- Provide architectural guidance to our data engineering function through the data migration and beyond
- Help the team adopt the approaches that make the biggest difference to delivery pace (tooling, patterns, workflow) and model those practices daily
- Lead technical discovery on complex or ambiguous problems: break them down, prototype where needed, and create clarity for others to execute
- Set and maintain engineering standards across quality, testing, deployment, observability, and security
- Work closely with the VP Engineering to keep technical direction and product ambition in sync
- Influence through expertise and trust: you're the technical authority in the room because of what you know, not what your title says
What We're Looking For
Required:
- Significant software engineering experience with clear progression to a senior or principal level
- Strong architectural fundamentals: you've designed systems that had to scale and lived with the consequences of those decisions
- Deep, practical AWS experience: infrastructure design, IaC, networking, observability, not just peripheral exposure
- Production Next.js/React experience and fluency in modern TypeScript
- Demonstrable experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate your own output and those around you
- The ability to influence without authority: you lead through credibility, clarity, and consistency
- A genuine delivery mindset: you know how to ship, not just design
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Strongly Preferred:
- A solid grounding in statistics and/or mathematics. We're a data company and quantitative reasoning runs through everything we build and everything our clients use
- Experience with data pipelines, analytical infrastructure, or anything adjacent to how data moves and transforms at scale
Nice to Have:
- PHP/Laravel (we have existing systems)
- Experience in analytics, research-tech, or consumer insights platforms
Benefits
- Hybrid working from Manchester, 3 days a week together
- A frontier-model budget you're expected to use hard
- Genuine technical ownership at a growing international data company operating across 22+ markets
- A team that values craft, pragmatism, and pace in equal measure
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