Senior Software Engineer

Tailsco Ltd; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 40,000 - 60,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading pet food company in Greater London seeks a Software Engineer to work with a diverse team on innovative solutions. You will collaborate across departments, using a modern tech stack including Python and Vue. This role offers a competitive salary, flexible hours, and opportunities for personal development within a supportive environment.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Annual bonus based on performance

Flexible core hours

Hybrid work options

25 days of holiday

Health insurance

Discount on Tails.com products

Discounted gym membership

Qualifications

• Familiarity with Python or any web-oriented language (PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.)
• Experience working in a product-led team.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with teams to solve difficult problems across the company.
• Work with a modern tech stack to deliver features and products.
• Lead best practices, ensuring great software engineering.

Skills

Python 3

JavaScript/TypeScript

Vue

CSS

Rest APIs/GraphQL

Relational DBs

Docker

Excellent communication skills

Writing efficient, tested and scalable code

Tools

Kubernetes

Sentry

Datadog

Grafana

Job description

Changing the world of pet food for good

We’re Tails.com, a dog food subscription company with a big difference. We create truly tailored food for each and every dog we serve. We start by asking people a few simple questions about their dog. Then we use that information to create their dog’s unique Tails.com recipe – so their dog gets exactly the nutrition they need, in the taste they love, delivered to their door every month. It’s clever stuff.

We are a fast-growing scale‑up company, transitioning from our start‑up roots and entering an exciting phase of rapid growth. As we evolve, we are focused on building a modern, scalable, and secure architecture that will support our ambitious plans for the future.

We’ve got bold plans. Having created an entirely new category in pet food, we’re now scaling fast – backed by Purina, one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards the same goals – and a bunch of smart‑ish dogs, all working on their own thing.

Together, we’ll change the world of pet food for good.

Software Engineering at Tails.com

We’re a 40+ strong, diverse team of software, cloud infrastructure and quality assurance engineers distributed across 6 squads, working across the customer‑facing parts of tails.com as well as factory automation and fulfilment of tens of thousands of orders per day - in 9 countries.

The role

You’ll work in one of our autonomous squads made up of engineers, product managers, designers, and quality assurance. You’ll collaborate with teams to solve difficult problems across the entire company - from marketing and data to factory engineers. As Python is currently our main language, we prefer you to be already familiar with Python or any other web‑oriented language (PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc).

In this position, you’ll get to:

• Work with a modern tech stack (Vue + Vite, Typescript, FastApi, Python) to deliver features and products
• Help team migrate out of legacy python/flask app
• Be part of a squad consisting of software engineers, QA engineers, product managers and designers
• Lead best practices, ensuring great software engineering and appropriate testing
• Contribute to the ongoing evolution of the platform architecture
• Participate in bi‑monthly hackdays to build or learn absolutely anything you want
• Build software in an environment that supports your individual growth
• Ensure our customers have a healthy and happy dog for life!

The skills you’ll bring:

• Python 3 (plus Flask, FastApi or any other framework)
• Javascript/Typescript
• Vue (or other modern frontend framework)
• CSS
• Rest APIs or GraphQL
• Some experience with relational DBs
• Basic understanding of Docker
• Experience working in a product‑led team
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• Writing efficient, tested and scalable code

Nice to haves:

• Experience with Kubernetes, event systems, and scaling and running high‑traffic software on AWS or GCP are nice to have
• Experience working with monitoring and observability tools (such as Sentry, Datadog, Grafana)

We ship early and often, so we push multiple deployments live per day through our CI/CD pipelines. Our local development environments have setup guides and it’s possible to ship something on your very first day. We like to keep the code review process friendly and supportive so everyone can learn and grow. We also make space in our sprints for learning and development time, and hold in‑house workshops on new technologies.

What’s in it for you?

• Competitive salary, reviewed annually
• Annual bonus, based on company performance
• Flexible core hours, giving you true work‑life balance
• Hybrid role to ensure this role works for you
• 25 days of holiday (excluding bank holidays) which increases over time to a max of 27 days
• 9/10 day working week to enhance your wellbeing without a reduction in pay and leave allowance
• Optional 5 days unpaid leave and 1 paid volunteer day each year
• When you need a change of scenery, you can work from abroad 2 weeks every 6 months
• Health insurance for you, paid by Tails.com
• Extended maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption pay. 6 months at 70% pay
• Flexible paid care leave to support immediate dependants, people close to you and pets
• In‑house L&D team, with access to year‑round courses to help drive your development
• 50% discount on all Tails.com
• Discounted gym membership

What’s next?

If this sounds like it matches your experience and what you’d love to do, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you’re unsure whether you fit our criteria exactly, please get in touch anyway. And because we believe that diverse teams perform better, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an underrepresented demographic.

Here’s a taster of how our recruitment process works:

1. Once you have applied, the engineering team will review your CV (we screen CVs together in small groups to avoid biases).
2. If selected, you will then have a call with someone in our software engineering team (30 mins).
3. If successful, you will be sent a tech test.
4. If successful, you will be invited to complete a 2.5 hour interview - 2x 1 hour interviews with peers and 1x 30 minute chat with our Head of Engineering.

Our Commitment

We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are underrepresented at Tails.com.

During your interview process you’ll meet some of our team with varying levels of responsibility and experience. We want to give every candidate a fair interview process and if you need any reasonable adjustments made, please let us know.