Senior Software Engineer, Backoffice Platform
Level inferred from job title
Job description
Own Ably's back office platform, the systems holding customer packages, entitlements, limits and billing, plus the tooling Finance, Customer Success and Support use daily. The role is hands-on across entitlements, administration tooling and billing, working with the Head of Infrastructure and the Developer Experience team.
At a glance
- Work mode
- Remote · UK, Europe
What you'll do
- Run the back office platform, looking after the systems holding every customer's packages, entitlements, limits and billing, along with the tooling Finance, Customer Success and Support use daily
- Solve problems, not tickets: own the design as well as the delivery for problems usually described by the people living with them rather than specified in advance
- Make admin work for the people who use it: staff should be able to see what a customer has bought, how they're billed and what limits they have, make a change, and trust the result, without needing to understand internal models
- Partner across the company: Finance, Customer Success, Support and Engineering are all your users; learn their processes well enough to question a requirement rather than just build it
- Champion AI-assisted development: use LLMs and AI tools for planning, spikes, code and docs to accelerate velocity, while owning correctness and architectural quality
- Make the systems explain themselves: why a customer has the limits they have, and what produced an invoice, should be answerable without an engineer digging through code
- Set the testing bar: decide what good looks like where mistakes cost money, build the harness to match, and hold the line on production readiness
What we're looking for
- Experience working in large, established codebases, and the judgement to tell when a system should be extended, reworked, or replaced outright, including the confidence to say so unprompted
- Ruby on Rails will help you get to grips with what we have today, though we care more about your range than any one language
- A track record of shaping architecture inside a system you inherited, including the data ownership decisions that come with drawing a boundary
- The ability to self-start, work through ambiguity, and make good decisions without a lot of hand-holding; push back when the answer is to change a process rather than write code
- An AI-first mindset: see LLMs and AI tools as productivity multipliers and know where to apply the rigour they can't provide themselves
- Experience making systems observable and testable: instrument what you own, use it to answer questions you never designed for, and have set a test strategy for a system with patchy coverage
Nice to have
- Experience of usage-based billing systems, whether built in-house or on a platform such as Orb, Metronome, or Chargebee
- A background in platform or internal tooling teams rather than product teams
- Experience being the engineer accountable for a system rather than one contributor among many, particularly one subject to financial or compliance audit
Your team
Back office platform team
Works closely with the Head of Infrastructure and the Developer Experience team, and directly with Finance, Customer Success and Support who use the platform.
Benefits
Enhanced parental leave: up to 16 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary, depending on length of service
- A remote-first and flexible work environment; the London office (next to Old Street) is there whenever you want it
- Equity through the EMI share options programme
- Enhanced holiday allowance: 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday)
- A home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 per year after that)
- A personal learning and development budget of £1000 a year, plus 5% L&D time during working hours
- Private healthcare with BUPA
- A medical cash plan covering a range of medical and dental costs
- Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space
- A monthly wellbeing budget via Juno
- Life assurance and income protection
- Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes
- A weekly snack allowance for the end-of-week "Need to Know" meeting
- A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably
Apply
About Ably
Realtime infrastructure for developers
Ably powers realtime digital experiences, delivering over 700 billion messages to more than 2 billion devices every month. Teams at HubSpot, Fin, Dialpad, NASCAR, Sportsbet, and General Motors build on Ably.
Mission
Help build the infrastructure that will shape the next generation of the internet, where more of what people do online is live, shared and interactive.
Key facts
- around 60 people
- Realtime infrastructure / developer platform
- Delivers over 700 billion messages to more than 2 billion devices every month
- Remote-first with a London office next to Old Street
- Company get-togethers twice a year, in February and August
- EMI share options programme
Partners & customers
What they value
- Open for all
- Tech needs humanity
- Even the best do better
- Bias for action
- Dependable by default
- Bold creativity wins