Contract Senior Software Engineer (JS/Python/GenAI)

About YLD:

Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward. Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract, inspire, develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London, Lisbon, and Porto.

About the role:

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team building innovative products. We expect you to be curious, passionate, driven, and enthusiastic. You’ll be proficient at problem-solving, and crafting scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant architectures. You’ll be an effective communicator and a team player. Furthermore, you and your team will move in a fast-paced engineering environment, achieving outstanding results and delivering exciting projects.

About You:

A YLD Software Engineering Consultant is a highly-skilled developer who exemplifies the highest standard in software engineering and enjoys sharing their knowledge and experience with others.

You’ll have the opportunity to build and deliver software within some interesting projects, both in terms of the product and the methodology. We work in an Agile environment (Scrum) with a test-first mindset (actually, writing code without tests should be unthinkable). We are also big advocates of pair programming and nothing is released until we have a code review.

You have a real passion for problem-solving and are an active learner who gets excited by working collaboratively with those around you.

If you are a proactive, adaptable, and enthusiastic engineer with a passion for leveraging multiple technologies to build exceptional backend solutions, we encourage you to apply. Join our team and contribute to the development of innovative products that make a difference in the industry.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will look like this:

• Crafting excellent products! As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will work on developing new features and optimising existing systems to drive our clients’ products forward in the best way.
• Working on AWS services to build and maintain a scalable cloud infrastructure
• Implementing CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
• Working closely with your team, regularly collaborating and on engineering initiatives, to continually push yourselves to be better
• Driving good practices within your team, making an impact on the whole department;
• Participating in regular show and tells, promoting your work to both your department and the wider company

You’ll have the following skills and experience:

• Proven strong experience as a Python Backend Engineer;
• Proficiency in JavaScript backend development, particularly with Node.js, including experience with serverless architectures such as AWS Lambda;
• Experience in other backend programming languages such as Go or Node (nice to have);
• Experience with frontend technologies, including React, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS;
• Strong experience with GenAi and LLMs: evals, guardrailing, RAG, caching, embeddings, search, chaining, agents, etc.;
• Experience in setting up and managing CI/CD pipelines, along with CI/CD tools and best practices — e.g Terraform, CloudFormation, and/or CDK;
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), containerisation; technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and orchestration platforms (e.g. AWS ECS);
• Familiarity with multiple protocols (e.g. HTTP, GraphQL, and gRPC);
• Experience in databases (relational, schema-less, and vector);
• Substantial testing experience from code quality through to security, customer journeys and accessibility;
• Building high-performance and scalable applications;
• Familiarity with performance monitoring tools;
• You can keep a cool head when debugging production issues.

You’ll be:

• Self-motivated, proactive and constantly looking for ways to improve and develop yourself
• An excellent communicator, both in writing and verbally. You’ll be able to explain technical ideas and concepts in business-friendly language
• Detail oriented
• Problem-solving skills that balance innovation with pragmatic technology choices to solve business needs
• Used to working in a team-oriented, collaborative environment
• Analytical and problem-solving-oriented
• A genuine believer in diversity and fairness

What you’ll get in return:

• The chance to work with a forward-thinking, ethical, and fun group of people and to develop and grow your skills in a fast-moving business

Our typical Recruitment Process looks like this:

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
• Technical Interview with our Senior Engineers (1h30)
• Final call with the project's Client Partner (30 mins)

We live and breathe our values, and know you will too:

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability status. Likewise, we also offer a remote-first working environment, meaning that flexible working and work-life balance come as standard for all employees.