I’m a recruiter. Yes. I know. Your finger’s hovering over the back button. Years of “exciting opportunity” emails from people who found your name by ctrl+F-ing “React” on LinkedIn have trained you well. But hear me out.
I’m working with a startup. They’re good. Not “good for a startup” good. Actually good. Their customers include names you’d recognise and at least one company whose dev tools you use daily without thinking about it. Someone on their Discord once described the product as “unreasonably good” and nobody disagreed.
They need a Product Engineer. I suggested Senior Software Engineer to get more clicks. They said no. I suggested we at least put “AI” somewhere in the title. The CTO went quiet for long enough that I changed the subject.
What you’d actually do
- Ship code that lands in front of real users who are mostly engineers themselves, which means they’ll find the bug you missed approximately eleven seconds after deployment and they will not be diplomatic about it.
- Build across the entire stack. Frontend. Backend. The haunted middle layer where nobody’s sure who owns it. The copy on the button, because the last person wrote “submit” unironically and everyone’s still recovering. Talk to customers directly on Slack, where there is no tone of voice, only chaos.
- Have opinions — not “well actually” opinions, but “I think we’re building the wrong thing and here’s what I’d do instead” opinions. If that sentence scared you, stop reading.
You might be right for this if you
- Have shipped in a small team and found it both exhilarating and mildly traumatic, sometimes in the same afternoon. You’ve deployed on a Friday. You know you shouldn’t have. You’d do it again.
- Care about craft but aren’t insufferable about it. You’ve deleted a thousand lines of your own code and felt lighter. You once refactored something beautiful into something ugly because the ugly thing actually worked and the beautiful thing was held together by optimism and a TODO comment from 2024.
- Have read a job description that said “fast-paced environment” and thought “but were you actually fast, though, or did you just have a lot of meetings about going fast?” I’ve watched this team work. They deployed to production twice during our onboarding call. I asked if that was normal. They said it was a quiet morning.
You’re probably not right for this if you
- Think Agile is a methodology rather than an adjective, or believe the word “Sprint” should ever be capitalised. They don’t have a scrum master, a velocity tracker, or a burndown chart. They have a Slack channel and a shared sense of urgency.
- Get excited about new frameworks the way some people get excited about new restaurants. They use boring technology deliberately. Postgres isn’t a database here, it’s a core value. Someone will defend it at a dinner party and they will be right and it will still be weird.
- Are looking for a management track. They need someone who wants to write code, not someone who wants to stop writing code in eighteen months and ascend to a role where your primary output is calendar invites and your primary emotion is exhaustion.
The deal
- Competitive salary — they actually pay well, I’m not just filling space. Equity that could be worth real money or a nice story for the pub. London hybrid or remote EMEA. Small team.
- No “unlimited holiday” that everyone’s too terrified to use. No ping-pong table. No “we’re a family” — they’re a team, they do good work, and they go home. The radical concept.
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