About the Role
At SpeedyBooker we’re on a mission to become the leading platform for specialist accommodation and leisure properties to operate and scale their businesses, backed by booking channels that are no.1 in their markets. We’re looking for a Lead Software engineer to raise the standard of engineering practice here. This is a heavily hands-on role. You’ll spend most of your week in the codebase, because that’s where a lead earns authority - not from the side of the room.
Here’s the actual work. We’re building a new PMS product, driven by a commercial opportunity. Today it sits on top of our legacy .NET platform and relies on it for much of its functionality; over time it’s intended to absorb that functionality and become the platform in its own right (a strangler-fig approach, if the term’s familiar). This isn’t a clean-sheet rebuild or a big-bang migration, but the more interesting problem of growing a new product out of a real, imperfect system that’s still serving customers.
You’ll set technical direction alongside the Engineering Manager, make the engineers around you better through review, mentoring and clear standards, and help the team build good judgement about AI-assisted development. We’re primarily a .NET / C# shop, but we care less about years of .NET on your CV than about strong fundamentals, systems thinking, and the ability to learn fast in context. Good fundamentals travel across stacks, and modern tooling makes an unfamiliar one far less of a barrier than it used to be.
We’re building a team where people are treated as capable adults - high trust, low ceremony, honest about what’s hard - and you’ll have a real hand in getting us there.
What You’ll Work On
- Writing and owning production code - the hands-on core of the job, not an occasional part of it.
- A new PMS product, built incrementally on top of our legacy .NET platform and designed to take over from it over time.
- A multi-brand booking platform with complex domain logic across consumer and vendor-facing surfaces.
- Levelling up an established team - stronger testing, review, and engineering practice, and mentoring as you go.
- Architectural direction for how the new and old systems coexist and evolve — the trade-offs and the long-term shape.
- The platform’s operational health - monitoring, alerting, observability, and a close relationship with our Infrastructure Engineer.
- Setting the team’s instincts for AI-assisted development.
- A codebase where your decisions are visible, your standards matter, and your impact is real.
What We’re Looking For
Essential
- Experience as a lead engineer or equivalent - with or without the title - accountable for technical direction in a software team.
- The ability to get productive fast in a large, imperfect codebase - you’ll be in a substantial legacy .NET / C# platform from day one. Deep .NET isn’t required; strong fundamentals and comfort in messy, low-coverage code are.
- Designing scalable, resilient, secure systems with honest trade-offs - improving legacy code incrementally rather than rebuilding from scratch.
- Strong unit-testing discipline and commitment to code quality, including where that culture must be established, not just maintained.
- A talent for making the engineers around you better - through review, mentoring, and clear standards.
- Good judgement on AI-assisted development, and the ability to help a team develop it.
- Communicating technical thinking clearly to commercially minded, non-technical stakeholders.
Desirable
- A bias for simplicity and maintainability - comfortable pushing back on unnecessary complexity.
- Front-end development experience.
- Deeper practice in TDD, BDD, observability, or Infrastructure as Code.
- Agile experience, comfort with ambiguity, and familiarity with CI/CD and fast feedback loops.
- Curiosity about customer and business context - you ask why, not just how.
What We Offer
- £75,000 – £100,000, dependent on experience, plus pension contributions.
- A long-term bonus plan that gives you a share in the growth in the value of the company.
- Real technical authority from day one - this is not an advisory role.
- Genuine influence over architectural direction and engineering standards during a significant period of change.
- Hybrid working, with the option of working from home on Mondays and Fridays.
- A learning environment where good engineering practice is taken seriously, with paid-for training.
- Holiday allowance that rises to 28 days over time, plus bank holidays.
- Relocation allowance if you move to Bury St Edmunds, and free car parking.
- A bright, dog-friendly office on Cornhill in the centre of Bury St Edmunds — ping pong, table football, darts, and as much coffee and tea as you can drink.
- Company events and social time.
- We donate over £20,000 every year to environmental causes, including a donation from every booking to the World Land Trust.
Why Speedybooker?
We’re a small team, which means the work you do here is visible and it matters — you’ll be able to point at what you’ve changed. You’ll be joining a twenty-seven-strong team of salespeople, account managers, and software developers with a strong, supportive culture.
The problems are real. The codebase has history, the platform has complexity, and not everything is as we’d like it to be. If you want a role where the challenges are genuine and the scope to improve things is equally genuine, this is that role.
If this sounds like the kind of role you’ve been looking for, we’d like to hear from you.
Our Commitments
We are passionate for vendor success and customer satisfaction. When they succeed, so do we. Engage with vendors, customers and data to continually differentiate our product (and service), measure and refine, strive for perfection.
We are true teammates. Be willing to offer help and humble to accept it; share and use best practice; be clear and open with each other, respectfully candid, accountable for your results, and selfless to seek the best for the company, not just yourself or your group.
We are tenacious for personal excellence. Always look to learn and improve (growth mindset), be positive, be proactive not reactive; be disciplined not to cut corners for short-term gain; pay attention to detail; go the extra mile; and have fun!
We focus on fewer things. The highest value opportunities within our niches delivered at pace, automate and simplify where possible, recognise we can’t be all things to everyone, avoid customisation and ‘barnacles’ (long-term uneconomical complexity).
---
We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences, including those who are underrepresented in the tech industry. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every requirement listed, we’d still love to hear from you — skills can be learned, and perspective and potential matter too.
Job Types: Full-time, Permanent
Pay: £75,000.00-£100,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Casual dress
- Company pension
- Free parking
- Relocation assistance
Application question(s):
- How much of your working week would you want to spend hands-on, writing and reviewing code? A rough percentage is fine.
- This role is based in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and needs you on site a minimum of 3 days a week. Does that work for you?
- When did you last write code that shipped to production, and what was it? A rough month and year plus one line is plenty.
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Bury St. Edmunds IP33 1BE
