Sr. Product Engineer

Senior Product Engineer Backend & Architecture focus · AI-native builder · Individual contributor Location: London – Hybrid · Salary: £70,000–£90,000 + equity (EMI options) · Reports to: Founders We're looking for a Senior Product Engineer who thrives in the new world of software development – strong backend and architecture instincts paired with AI-native fluency to ship real product, fast. This is an ownership role, not a ticket-completion role: you investigate the real problem, decide what should change, recommend the fix and ship it, using modern AI tooling to move faster than a traditional team can. Placed is a talent attraction platform built for quality hiring at scale, helping employers optimise recruitment spend for candidate quality with a recognised brand and a validated product. A well-known brand with loyal enterprise customers. Backend & architecture. Design, build and evolve the services, APIs, data pipelines and scoring/recommendation logic at the core of the product – owning architecture, infrastructure, schema design, engineering standards and the trade-offs that come with them, all hands-on. Take initiatives from concept to release – investigating issues, separating data problems from spec gaps, recommending the fix, building, testing and following through. Translate commercial and product strategy into scalable, high-quality technical delivery. Keep core pipelines and infrastructure healthy (cloud, CI/CD, containerised deployments), treating production stability and data integrity as part of the job. Strong full-stack / backend engineering. 5+ years of professional software development (stack flexible) with strong server-side fundamentals – API design, data modelling/schema design, authentication patterns and clean service architecture. Comfortable across SQL databases and a modern backend stack (e.g. Python, Node/TypeScript). A track record of shipping features end-to-end in a fast-moving environment and owning the outcome. AI-native ways of working. You already build with AI coding tools (e.g. Autonomy & bias to ship. You operate independently and drive work to done without hand-holding – you'd rather be building than managing. Product & commercial sense. You understand how technology drives customer value, weigh speed vs quality sensibly, and make progress without perfect information. Clear, structured communicator who can bridge technical and commercial perspectives, explain trade-offs, and quickly understand a problem domain. Event-driven architectures and high-volume data pipelines. Practical task with AI (~60 min). A real, scoped problem you tackle using Claude / AI tooling. We want to see how you break work down, use AI to move fast, keep architectural control, and separate a data issue from a spec gap. A deeper discussion of backend and architecture experience, real problems you've solved, and how you think about trade-offs – testing depth and whether you own decisions or just describe systems. #