Lead Backend

Just Move In is building the Amazon for moving and home & financial services. We partner with leading brands and service providers to take the admin pain out of moving, from council tax and utilities to broadband and insurance. We’re rebuilding how our services are offered and delivered, launching an Ai native platform, opening the door to significant growth, and we’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help us scale an integration‑heavy platform that connects residents, partners, and suppliers.

Important Note:

please make sure to highlight your PHP/ Laravel experience in your resume. Otherwise we will not be able to filter your resume.

Why work at Just Move In?

• Big, integration-first challenges: You’ll design, build, and scale reliable third-party integrations (utilities, broadband, payments, identity, CRMs, and more), turning messy real‑world APIs into a cohesive, developer‑friendly platform.
• Complex orchestration and systems thinking: Model and operate multi‑step workflows (COOs, move lifecycles, partner SLAs) with clear state machines, scheduling, retries, and reconciliation, turning real‑world edge cases into reliable, observable software.
• Small team, big impact: Join a tight-knit engineering team where your decisions shape architecture, velocity, and culture. This is a high-ownership role with direct impact on business outcomes.
• Ship first, iterate later: We bias to action. You’ll put working software in users’ hands quickly, then refine based on real feedback and data.
• High accountability, clear goals: We operate with KPIs around delivery predictability. We agree on estimates and review progress frequently. There’s no time tracking, but we actively performance manage to ensure goals are met and risks are surfaced early.
• Real-world impact: We save movers time and stress while helping them choose great, often greener services.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and delivery of integrations: evaluate partner APIs, define technical contracts, implement adapters/connectors, auth flows (OAuth2, API keys, HMAC), webhooks, polling, reconciliation, and error handling.
• Design end‑to‑end workflow orchestration: event ingestion, state transitions, scheduling, retries/backoff, idempotency, deduplication, and reconciliation.
• Build robust ETL pipelines: data mapping, schema evolution, conflict resolution, backfills, and partial‑failure recovery.
• Define domain models, invariants, and consistency boundaries;
  document them with clear specs and sequence diagrams.
• Shape backend architecture and strategy for our services platform (orchestration, ordering/fulfilment, billing, identity/permissions), with an emphasis on reliability, observability, and scale.
• Write clear technical specs, break down work, and lead engineering refinement with realistic estimates.
• Raise the bar on reliability: idempotency, retries/backoff, circuit breakers, DLQs, SLIs/SLOs, and robust monitoring/alerting.
• Contribute production code daily (majority backend;
  occasional frontend).
• Participate in code reviews.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to a healthy, pragmatic engineering culture.
• Support hiring: conduct technical interviews and help refine our process.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience with a strong backend focus.
• Proven track record building and maintaining third‑party integrations and internal/external APIs.
• Deep experience with PHP/Laravel and SQL databases.
• Experience modeling complex domains and workflows (state machines, domain-driven design, orchestration).
• Comfortable with eventual consistency, consistency trade‑offs, and designing for determinism/idempotency in distributed systems.
• Comfortable with queues and event-driven patterns and background job processing.
• Solid engineering fundamentals: testing strategies, CI/CD, Git, containers, cloud (we’re on AWS), application security, and performance.
• Excellent communication;
  product mindset;
  comfortable with ambiguity;
  bias for shipping and learning.
• Nice-to-have: payments, utilities/energy/broadband domain knowledge;
  SOAP/XML/CSV legacy integrations;
  data mapping;
  Datadog;
  feature flags;
  GDPR familiarity.

Technology

You should have working knowledge of PHP, Laravel, Vue.Js, and MySQL or any equivalent (TypeScript/Node.Js, Python, Ruby, Go, React, Angular, Postgres, MSSQL, etc.). Most work will be backend and integration focused, with some light frontend when useful.

Please only apply if you are excited about a heavy code contribution role. We’re not hiring engineering managers right now, though growth into Staff/Tech Lead is absolutely on the table as we scale.

Familiarity with workflow patterns (queues + workers, schedulers, state machines) is a plus.

Perks

• Competitive salary
• Remote-first culture aligned to UK business hours
• Flexible time off
• Modern equipment and tools
• Learning and development support
• Occasional team meetups

FAQs

Do I need to come into an office?

No. This is a remote role aligned to UK hours. We do occasional team meetups.

Will I be micromanaged or asked to install a time tracker?

No. We value ownership and outcomes. Work collaboratively within UK business hours. No time trackers.

Will my work ship?

Yes. We ship fast and iterate. Your work will be in production in your first few weeks.

Is the process dragged out?

No. Our interview process is efficient and respectful of your time.

Is the role mostly backend?

Yes. Expect 70–90% backend/integrations and occasional frontend for internal tools.

Is the company growing?

Absolutely We’re building a new approach to how our services are offered and delivered, creating significant greenfield opportunities and room to grow your responsibility and scope.

How to apply

Share your CV and a brief note about a challenging integration you’ve built (what made it hard and how you made it reliable). Links to repos, specs, or blog posts welcome.