HUG is excited to partner with an innovative tech startup to recruit a Product Engineer (Backend-Leaning Full Stack) to join their UK-based team.

This dynamic company is leveraging network effects and data-driven insights to create impactful solutions, offering a collaborative and fast-paced environment for talented professionals.

About the Role: We’re seeking a product-focused, backend-leaning full-stack engineer to join a small, high-performing team. This role goes beyond coding - you’ll collaborate to understand customer and business challenges, help shape pragmatic technical roadmaps, and deliver scalable systems that support long-term growth.

Key Responsibilities:

• Contribute to high-level system architecture for evolving platforms, balancing immediate deliverables with future scalability.
• Design and implement data schemas based on business and user needs, potentially integrating continuous machine learning pipelines.
• Develop, deploy, and maintain backend and frontend systems in production, including implementing monitoring and alerting mechanisms. Ideally, contribute to building recommendation systems (algorithmic or machine learning-based) or quickly adapt to iterating on them.
• Ensure production system reliability with best-effort responses to incidents, including outside regular hours, while focusing on root-cause resolutions.
• Engage deeply with customer and business challenges, working closely with product and operations teams - often addressing smaller tasks early in the week and strategic initiatives later.
• Propose product improvements and provide constructive feedback to enhance the team and product.

What We’re Looking For:

• At least 5 years of professional experience as a software engineer.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript; experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is preferred (or the ability to quickly learn similar technologies).
• Robust system design skills, with the ability to clearly explain architectural trade-offs.
• Extensive expertise in backend development, including designing resilient systems, secure and performant REST APIs, and optimising database queries and indexes.
• Proven experience managing production systems, emphasising reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and streamlined cloud operations.
• Some experience developing frontend applications using React (e.g., Next.js).
• Preferably, familiarity with event-driven architectures and managing data collection while addressing privacy and ethical considerations, particularly for personal or social data.
• A product-focused mindset, pragmatic approach, ownership mentality, strong communication skills, reliability, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment with initiative and a passion for impactful engineering.

Why Join?

• Join a talented, passionate team working on data-driven projects with strong network effects.
• Salary up to £90K depending on experience, with comprehensive benefits including 25 days holiday plus public holidays. Remote working with UK time overlap.
• Collaborate in a small, scaling team with direct access to technical leadership and the founder.
• Make a meaningful impact in a startup focused on innovative, scalable solutions.