Senior Trust & Safety Engineer

Checkatrade; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Annual bonus

Equity scheme

Health & wellbeing

Job summary

Checkatrade is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Trust & Safety in the UK. You will own verification systems, reviews flow, and content moderation, shaping how trust is maintained at scale.

You’ll respond to incidents, read traces, and design reliable event-driven workflows while collaborating with vetting and reviews teams to uphold high standards of trust and data integrity.

Qualifications

• Strong TypeScript: own a service end to end.
• Experience with Fastify or similar Node.js framework.
• Event-driven development incl. idempotency and outbox patterns.
• Full-stack capability with Next.js.
• Datadog fluency and SQL for diagnostics.
• GCP basics including Pub/Sub and DLQs.
• Experience leading production incidents and clear communication.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve systems behind verification, reviews flow and content moderation.
• Lead the response when things break: read traces, correlate logs, find the cause.
• Design reliable event-driven workflows with idempotent and retriable patterns and DLQs.
• Collaborate with vetting and reviews teams to define trust in day-to-day work.
• Tighten operational seams: monitoring, alerts, auth, and outbox data consistency.

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

Event-driven

Full-stack

Next.js

Datadog

SQL

GCP

Incident response

AI tooling

Tools

Fastify

Next.js

Pub/Sub

DLQ

Datadog

Job description

You've found a role that could be your next big move. Here's everything you need to know about the job and what it's like to work at Checkatrade.

We started as the place to find a trusted trade. Now, as we shape the future of home improvement, we're building the tech to transform that landscape for everyone - better products, smarter data, AI where it actually helps - so trades can spend less time on admin and consumers can find someone they trust, first time. That's Powering Great Work, and it's why every team here exists:

Trades spend less time on admin and more on winning work and growing their business.

Homeowners get a trusted trade, first time, every time.

We get to build products that change homes and lives across the country.

As our next Senior Software Engineer in Trust & Safety, you'll own the systems that decide how tradespeople are checked, how reviews are processed and how our marketplace stays honest at scale. You'll work alongside the vetting and reviews teams, who are on the front line of trust, and build the infrastructure that lets them work with confidence. When something breaks in production, you'll lead the response. When something looks brittle at design time, you'll say so.

The job, unfiltered:

Own and evolve the systems behind how tradespeople are verified, how reviews flow through our platform and how content is moderated.

Lead the response when things break: read distributed traces, correlate logs across services and find the cause, not just the symptom.

Design event-driven workflows that are reliable by default: idempotent, retryable, with dead-letter handling that doesn't need a 2am wake-up to unpick.

Work directly with the vetting and reviews teams to understand what trust means day to day, then build systems that hold up to it.

Tighten the operational seams: better monitoring, clearer alerting, locked-down auth and outbox patterns that keep data consistent.

The fit:

Strong TypeScript. You're comfortable owning a service end to end, from schema to deployment.

Fastify or a similar Node.js framework, and enough HTTP know-how that it rarely surprises you.

Event-driven instincts: you know what idempotency means in practice and why the outbox pattern exists.

Full-stack comfort, Next.js included. You ship the frontend as happily as the service behind it.

Datadog fluency (APM traces, log search, metric queries), SQL for diagnostics during an incident, and GCP basics such as Pub/Sub backlogs and DLQs.

Experience leading production incidents, not just being in them. You communicate clearly under pressure and drive to a fix.

An eye for systemic problems at review time, not at post-mortem time, and a habit of making the people around you better.

Regular use of AI tools like Cursor or Claude Code, and a keen interest in helping the team get more out of them.

You don't need to know our Trust & Safety domain yet (the review lifecycle, vetting disposition logic, publish timing). You'll pick it up. What matters is that you learn fast and take it seriously.

(Don't self-select out because you don't tick every box. We'd rather meet you.)

What you get

• Competitive salary, annual bonus & equity scheme
• Health, wellbeing and learning support
• Birthday/special day leave, buy & sell holiday scheme
• 1 week's paid charity leave, and more

How this goes

• Screening call with one of our Talent Acquisition Partners
• Technical interview with members of the team
• Final stage with the hiring manager and a senior stakeholder

Not this one? Stay close anyway. Join the Talent Community and we'll ping you the second something better fits.

About us

We’re Checkatrade – the UK’s leading platform for finding a tradesperson. With more than 50,000 trades listed and over 6 million reviews, we help homeowners get jobs done right and help tradespeople grow their business.

We’re growing fast, with big plans to become the go-to brand for home improvements. If you care about great work, take pride in the details, and want to make an impact, you’ll fit right in.

Our latest quarterly product release is here

Our latest quarterly product release is here. It highlights the continued focus and effort we're putting into creating new ways for our tradespeople to showcase their expertise, and help them win more work. Watch the launch video to see what's new...

Last week we welcomed the very first Checkatrade Trade Advisory Panel, bringing together skilled tradespeople from across the country. We started the session with a simple message, that input from the tradespeople around the table directly influences improvements that benefit the whole trade community. Our goal is clear: to listen, learn, and take action...

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Shout out to our Engineers Jess Madhavan and Rossana Ventrella for bringing together over 100 brilliant minds last night for our latest Checkatrade Tech Meetup! It was incredible to feel the energy in the room. The questions and ideas from the curious, collaborative, and creative tech lovers who came along prove the scene is thriving...