Junior Platform Engineer
Location: South Wales - Hybrid, with regular days working alongside the Chief Technology Officer
Job type: Permanent, Full-time
Salary: £35,000–£38,000 per year, with potential for bonuses
About Founders Group Services (incorporating Engineer Now!)
Founders Group Services Ltd is the operating company behind a small group of software businesses, including Engineer Now!
We build and operate software products rather than sell consultancy. We take ideas, build them properly, launch them and run them as live businesses.
Engineer Now! is one of the group's established software businesses, alongside other products at different stages of development.
The technology function across the whole group is currently one person, the CTO. This role is the second, and it is a deliberate step towards building a team.
About the role:
We are looking for a Junior Platform Engineer to work directly with our CTO across the group's products.
This is a varied role, roughly 50% operations and 50% development. You'll work on live systems as well as products that are still being built, giving you exposure to a much broader range of engineering work than you would typically get in a single-product role.
Your work will initially be reviewed and approved by the CTO before reaching production. As your experience and judgement develop, you'll take on increasing responsibility and independence.
Your week could involve investigating a payment issue on a live platform, deploying a service, reviewing a dependency upgrade, answering a question using production data, or helping establish the infrastructure for a new product.
It's a role for someone who enjoys variety, wants to learn quickly and takes pride in doing things properly.
What you'll be doing:
- Investigating questions using live data and SQL, checking important figures carefully before they are reported.
- Preparing and carrying out approved production data changes safely and methodically.
- Deploying backend services and web applications using our deployment tooling.
- Investigating live faults using application logs and database information.
- Supporting customers and field users when they are blocked and fixing underlying causes rather than just symptoms.
- Building and maintaining small operational tools and automated tests.
- Writing and reviewing pull requests and keeping dependencies and builds up to date.
- Developing small features and fixes across Java backends, web applications and mobile apps.
- Helping set up new products, including repositories, pipelines and environments.
- Maintaining runbooks, technical decisions and action logs.
- Progressing towards participation in the on-call rota once you are ready.
What we're looking for essential:
- Good SQL skills. You can read an unfamiliar database schema, write joins and aggregates, and explain what your query does, and does not, prove.
- Command-line confidence. You are comfortable using Bash or a similar environment and can read and understand a script.
- Ability to read Java. You don't need to be an expert, but you should be able to navigate an unfamiliar service and understand how a particular piece of data is produced.
- Comfort with Git and pull requests.
- Clear written English. You'll often need to explain technical issues accurately to people who aren't technical.
- Good organisation. You can manage several pieces of work and maintain a reliable written record while switching between products.
- A careful approach to engineering. You're comfortable stopping to ask questions rather than making assumptions, and you're willing to say when you don't know something.
Desirable:
You don't need all of these, but experience with any of them would be useful:
- AWS, particularly EC2, S3, CloudWatch or Systems Manager.
- Spring Boot or another server-side framework.
- Kotlin, Swift, Vue or React.
- Payment systems, invoicing or accounting data.
- Linux server administration.
You don't need:
- A university degree.
- Previous commercial software engineering experience.
- Knowledge of our specific technology stack.
We're very happy to consider candidates coming from an apprenticeship, bootcamp, first support role or another route into technology, provided you can demonstrate the skills and attitude we're looking for.
We'll teach you our stack. What matters most is that you are curious, methodical and willing to check your work properly.
A realistic picture of the role:
We want to be upfront about the environment you'll be working in.
One of our live products does not currently have a staging environment. Changes therefore have to be handled carefully against the real system, using tooling, restore points, testing and review rather than relying on a separate environment.
That means attention to detail matters.
The most important skill for this role isn't knowing a particular framework. It's knowing how to check your work.
We're looking for someone who notices when a database column doesn't mean quite what its name suggests, understands the difference between a test that passed and a test that genuinely tested something, and is comfortable saying "I'm not sure" and stopping rather than guessing.
If that sounds like you, you'll fit in well here.
How we'll assess you:
There is no whiteboard coding exercise.
We'll give you read-only access to a realistic dataset and ask you to answer a question using it. We're interested not just in the answer, but in how you check that your answer is correct.
We'll also ask you to tell us about something you got wrong in the past and how you discovered and corrected it.
What we offer:
- £35,000–£38,000 salary, depending on experience.
- Potential for bonuses.
- Permanent, full-time employment.
- Hybrid working, with regular time working directly alongside the CTO.
- Laptop.
- Mobile phone.
- Training budget.
- The opportunity to work across multiple products and technologies.
- A clear path to increasing responsibility as your skills and judgement develop.
Interested?
If you're early in your engineering career and want a role where you'll learn by working on real systems, real products and real problems, we'd like to hear from you.
Apply now with your CV and tell us briefly why this role interests you.
Pay: £35,000.00-£38,000.00 per year
Application question(s):
- Are you confident with SQL?
- Can you read Java?
- Do you have excellent and clear written English skills?
Work authorisation:
- United Kingdom (required)
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Cowbridge CF71
