Connecting people to their family stories is special. We're proud to deliver these magic moments. Through technology, data and insights, we bring people closer to their past, to benefit their future.

We’re a fast-growing team of smart people, on a mission to help millions. Solve meaningful, complex problems and be a part of something magical. Enjoy the agility of a scale-up with the security of real financial backing, in a place where every story matters.

As a remote-first organisation, Findmypast employees choose how and where in the UK they work best, whether that's from home or at one of our offices. Yet, we recognise the value of seeing each other in person from time to time. Our quarterly team meet-ups, social gatherings, and biannual company offsite events offer the perfect opportunities for collaborative work.

Reasons to join our engineering team:

• We’re driven by the desire to create a fantastic customer experience
• We’re passionate about processing big data and to make it easy for our consumers to build their family journey
• We collaborate across teams, working in an Agile environment where we focus on individual development and a growth mindset
• We promote flexible working, including working from home, and we support each individual’s personal wellbeing
• We work in small teams, so that employees are develop in a supportive environment and test out their ideas, whilst having a direct impact on the business
• We promote professional development and wellbeing. This means you will have a mentor, a buddy, learn from colleagues, and be able to discuss new information and across teams

At Findmypast, you will receive:

• UK bank holidays, a generous allowance of 26 days holiday, with the opportunity to purchase 4 more
• Private medical insurance, health and dental cash plans
• Flexible working, including the opportunity to work from home
• Enhanced and shared maternity, paternity and adoption leave
• Life assurance scheme
• Child tax credits
• Allocated daily learning time plus generous learning budget

About the Role:

The role of the Principal is front and centre to delivering a timely, high-quality product for our customers. You’ll be providing technical leadership and expertise to the teams you are working with.

Here’s what we look for in our Principal engineers:

• Technical leadership; confidently taking us through all phases of challenging and complex projects
• Mentoring and supporting others to deliver efficient, high-quality implementation at a project level and on your own tasks
• Contributing to the strategic technical direction of our Engineering department
• Designing, developing and deploying user experiences with a focus on usability, high availability, low latency and scalability
• Building out and improving our new Node.js backend systems, to meet the needs of a modern and growing business
• Operational responsibility for the services that are owned by your team in a DevOps culture
• Continuously improving our product by innovating on the service through experimentation and testing.

If you’re keen to read more about how our Engineering team works and hear about some recent remote onboarding experiences, check out our tech blog.

Requirements

The Job entails:

• Lead on complex projects from inception to delivery, ideally with some experience gained in a rapidly growing technology company
• Bring strong communication skills and a love of working in a team
• Bring experience mentoring others and consistently pushing for continuous improvement
• Manage technical roadmaps with a long-term view of architecture within and across other engineering teams
• Demonstrate strong coding skills with JavaScript
• Show a desire to champion expressive code and simplify solutions

If you feel that this matches your experience, then we look forward to hearing from you!

What to expect after applying:

• You will have an initial call with a member of our People Team
• This will be followed by a coding test and pairing with engineers from the team
• Our final step is an interview with an Engineering Lead and Engineers from the team

If you have additional requirements in the interview process, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We promote an inclusive environment, and we are an equal opportunity employer. At Findmypast, we understand the importance of family and we have a clear vision of recruiting and training employees, regardless of race, gender identity, religion, and sexual orientation. You can see our most recent Diversity and Inclusion report and to learn more about our ongoing commitment to diversity, you can hear from our CEO Tamsin.

Benefits

We're passionate about making FMP a great place to work and setting people up to succeed. Benefits include:

• 26 days holidays + UK bank holidays. We also offer the option to purchase up to 4 additional days.
• Excellent pension contribution from day one of up to 15.5% of your basic salary (9.5% matched company contribution with a 6% contribution from the employee's side).
• Flexible working, as we want all our employees to have a brilliant work-life balance.
• Enhanced and shared maternity/paternity/adoption leave.
• Learning & Development budget, access to LinkedIn Learning and training opportunities.
• Various social remote activities to keep connected as a company.
• Employee Assistance Programme, wellbeing app access and Mental Health First Aiders.
• Life assurance.
• Private medical insurance, health and dental cash plan options.
• Gym membership and staff discounts.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• Season travel tickets.
• BorrowMyDoggy subscription
• Subscriptions to Findmypast and British Newspaper Archive.

If you are a recruitment agency, please be aware that we're not looking for additional assistance with recruitment. Please do not send us CVs. We will not be responsible for fees related to unsolicited CVs.