Senior Product Engineer [Backend]

Plain

Plain is redefining customer support for the next generation of B2B companies. We’re building the fastest, most powerful platform to help companies move beyond reactive support and build true customer relationships. Some of the world’s most forward-thinking companies - like Cursor, Raycast, and Granola - trust Plain to unify all customer interactions, enable faster team collaboration, and supercharge their workflows with AI. B2B customer support is undergoing a seismic shift. AI is transforming the way companies engage with customers, shifting support from a siloed function to a company-wide effort across Slack, Discord, and any other channel you talk to customers in. The old way - slow, manual, and disconnected - no longer works. This role is hybrid with 3 days a week in our London office. WHAT YOU’LL DO We’re in a rare spot. Plain is already powering support for high-growth companies with a lightning-fast, deeply scalable platform. AI has been part of our DNA from the start. Now we’re doubling down to define how it shapes every layer of modern customer support. This is where you come in. We're looking for a customer obsessed Senior Product Engineer to help take our AI ambitions to the next level. You’ll build the Infrastructure that helps us build AI features quickly, safely and with confidence. You’ll own problems end to end, and play a key role in building a category-defining product. In this role, you will: * Own and ship AI features such as our agents, assistants, insights and more - from concept to production. * Design and implement backend services for AI integrations and data pipeline. * Build robust APIs and abstractions for internal AI usage * Drive system scalability: caching, optimization, processing patterns, etc * Contribute and drive the evolution of the infrastructure for AI including architecture, evaluation and iteration pipelines. * Solve complex AI challenges around AI accuracy, reliability, and quality – using rigorous quantitive approaches. * Advocate for our work externally – writing, speaking, and engaging with the broader AI community. THIS IS A GREAT FIT IF YOU… * Are an experienced backend engineer who’s shipped AI products in the OpenAI & Anthropic era – especially text and data-heavy AI applications. * Have hands-on experience with LLM orchestration and LLM API optimization (costs, latency, etc) * Are familiar with RAG architectures and technologies * Have AI observability experience. AI isn’t just about shipping features that sound great – it’s about knowing, conclusively, if they’re making things better. * Have a clear perspective on what makes a great AI product. We want to apply AI with precision, nuance, and real impact – not as a gimmick. * Are product minded and customer focused in how you build software. * Measure your success by user impact, not just technical elegance. * Are self-driven, impact-focused, and thrive in a fast-moving, high-ownership environment. * Bonus: you have experience with agent frameworks and design. THIS WON’T BE THE RIGHT ROLE IF YOU… * Have primarily academic or research ML/AI experience. This role’s looking for someone with Applied AI experience. * Think AI for support is just chatbots and deflection. B2B support is complex – we want AI through the platform, not just automating conversations. * Struggle with ambiguity. We’re an early-stage startup. Things change quickly, and often, knowing what to work on is as important as the work itself. * Prioritize working with the latest tech for its own sake. We choose tools that make us productive – not what’s trendy. (Postgres is great.) * Are looking for a management role. This is a hands-on individual contributor position. * Want the perks of a big company. We offer competitive compensation for our stage, but we’re a startup – this is a different kind of opportunity.

Ankar

OVERVIEW The way companies innovate is broken. The systems built to create and protect ideas can’t keep up with the pace of change. Today, 90% of S&P 500 company value is intangible (e.g., in intellectual property) - yet R&D and IP teams spend half their time buried in manual work, sifting through patents and paperwork instead of pushing the frontier forward. The tools of creating and protecting are stuck in the past. We’re here to fix that. Ankar is building the R&D tools for the AI era and defining what applied research will look like in the next 20 years. We’re building infrastructure and product experiences our customers rely on every day. You’ll translate messy, ambiguous problems into clean, dependable software—and you’ll do it at the cutting-edge of AI. We’re at an inflection point: * We’ve raised >$24M to date from Tier-1 VCs like Atomico, Index Ventures, Norrsken, Daphni, and angels like the Founder of Hugging Face, CEO from Datadog, and Leaders from DeepMind and OpenAI. * We’re already working with the world’s most innovative companies including Fortune 500 company L’Oréal and global law firm Vorys * Expanding our world-class team with alumni from Palantir, Amazon, and BCG to tackle the $1T+ innovation market. We’re just getting started.   What you’ll do: * Build world-class product. Design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable systems and user-facing product experiences that customers depend on. * Ship fast and iterate constantly. Deliver quickly, learn from real feedback, and refine the product week by week with direct access to customers. * Own end-to-end execution. Take full ownership of projects across frontend, backend, and deployment—from design to implementation to monitoring and maintenance. * Partner deeply with teammates and customers. Collaborate closely with product, design, and customer-facing teams and customers themselves to ensure what we build is useful, usable, and impactful.   Culture at Ankar: Culture at Ankar is how we think, build, and operate. We’re building a generational company that redefines how the world’s best R&D teams create and protect ideas. * Contrarian - we think from first principles: We think deeply, question assumptions, and build from first principles. The best ideas come from clarity and rigour. * Creative - we build with taste: We’re building the R&D tools for the AI era and shaping what applied research looks like over the next 20 years. We care about precision, quality, and systems that last. * Competitive - we play to win: We move with urgency and set a very high bar for ourselves and each other. Every win raises the bar. Every challenge sharpens us. This role is not for you if... * You need a highly structured environment, a predefined playbook, regular working hours, or a schedule that never requires travel. We operate with high autonomy and ownership, expect our team to go above and beyond, be obsessed with our mission and thrive in ambiguity rather than wait for direction. * You prefer long planning cycles and certainty before acting. We move quickly, ship often, and adapt based on customer feedback and new information. * You want to manage the work rather than do the work. We're builders first, and everyone is expected to contribute directly to creating exceptional products. * You take it personally when ideas are challenged, priorities shift, or work gets redirected. We care more about finding the right answer than defending a particular one.   What we put behind our people Building at the frontier takes exceptional people. We invest accordingly. * Health Insurance : Full private health & dental coverage for you and your dependents. * Pension: Flexible pension scheme with up to 5% employer matching on qualifying earnings. * Food on us: Team lunches twice a week, plus dinner when working late in the office. * Cycle to work: Green Commute initiative scheme (up to £3k) to help you get a new bike tax-free. * Way we work: We combine deep, in-person collaboration (minimum 3 days/week in our Shoreditch office) with flexibility and trust. What matters is ownership, impact, and results, not where you work from. * Visa sponsorship: Yes   Compensation We believe exceptional people should be compensated accordingly. £160,000–£300,000 including equity (depending on experience)

Beam

At Beam, you get to do work that matters for the world. We’re solving the world's toughest social problems with an incredible team, tech and AI. And we’re growing fast 🚀 It’s not easy. Nothing worth doing ever is. Join a company at the forefront of social impact, driving first-of-its-kind positive change. You’ll be part of a high-performance culture where you'll make a huge impact, rapidly progress your career, and truly enjoy your work. From top-tier coaching and personal development budgets to competitive salaries, we take care of everyone who works at Beam. We’ve already seen incredible growth from our Beam Notes product, helping frontline workers save over 8 hours of admin per week. From social workers and NHS clinicians to mental health practitioners and safeguarding specialists, nearly 100,000 frontline workers across the UK, US and Australia are now using Beam Notes regularly to deliver faster, more human-centred support. THE OPPORTUNITY AT BEAM We’re looking for Senior (and above) software engineers with a product-mindset to join our product teams to help build the future of Beam with the right technologies. It’s a passionate and growing team (doubled in size in 2024) and values autonomy, empowerment and bias-to-action. We want engineers who want to take responsibility for the product they are building and take part in every part of the product creation. We’re solving some hard problems that aren’t just technical, and value people who want to solve them with us. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING * Help build our technology for the future - be it infrastructure or front-end. We value generalists * Work with product, design, commercial and analytics to figure out what new features to build within our product * Building internal tools - for our team to help as many people as efficiently as possible * Using the latest generative AI tooling to empower our caseworkers to focus on what matters, helping those in need * Get deep into the power of the LLMs that exist and figure out ideal optimisations across our systems with them WHY IS THIS EXCITING? * Our MagicNotes product is already used by thousands of case workers per day - you will have an opportunity to figure out the future of it or you’ll be designing and defining the future of our BeamForce product * You will have a high degree of autonomy working with other exceptional and like minded engineers and product people * You will see your features used by people who really need them - and see the amazing 5-star feedback we get in return for building these critical features WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR * Breadth of experience across infrastructure, backend and frontend technology stacks * We use the latest Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and PostgreSQL running on GCP * React + Typescript on the client backed by our shadcn design system * OpenAI & Claude for LLM interfacing * We are not wedded to them and will rapidly evolve over the next 3-6 months with the right technologies * Has worked in complex software systems - both front-end and back-end and understands the importance of good data structures, a scalable architecture and constantly evolving tech stack * You care about the “right tool for the right job” and pick the pragmatic options when building software * Enjoys working in cross functional teams - PMs, UX, Designers and Data * You have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to make data-informed decisions * You have an entrepreneurial, get-things-done attitude * You'll contribute to fostering a culture of psychological safety, inclusivity, collaboration and continuous improvement within the team through participation in retrospectives and feedback * You're passionate about social mobility We have a strong preference for London-based engineers who can regularly meet the team to problem solve in person. We're committed to advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion through our work as an organisation, and that starts with the team we build. 53% of the people we support are from ethnic minority backgrounds and 17% have disabilities. We believe we serve these people best when we’re a diverse and inclusive team. To that end, we particularly welcome applications from ethnic minority candidates and/or those who’ve experienced social disadvantage. APPLICATION PROCESS We take hiring seriously. We have a 4-stage and an optional 5th interview process, giving you plenty of time to learn about Beam while we get to know you. 1. 30 mins with our Talent team 2. 45 minute Interview with Ben, our VP Engineering 3. 1 hour technical test with two of our Senior Engineers 4. 1 hour systems design interview with two of our Senior Engineers 5. 30 minute product and cultural interview with one of our founders ABOUT BEAM Our team of 200+ embraces a hybrid working approach, enjoying 2-3 days of vibrant collaboration in our beautiful Shoreditch co-working space, fully equipped with rooftop views, an onsite barista and kitted out gym. We’ve picked up an armful of awards for our work, including one from our former Queen. We've also been named by WIRED as one of London's 10 hottest startups and by LinkedIn as a Top 15 UK Startup. Meanwhile, we've been covered in the media literally thousands of times, including the likes of The FT, BBC, TechCrunch, Forbes and The Guardian. We’re also proud to be backed by some of the world's leading tech investors and entrepreneurs, including the founders of Booking.com, Calm, Shazam and Dropbox. Start your journey to a more impactful career today. We're excited to hear from you. Reasonable adjustments: Beam is committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse, and supportive work environment for all employees. This policy extends to our hiring practices. We recognise that some candidates may need additional support during their hiring process to give them the best chance of being a success. To ensure that all candidates have an equitable opportunity during their process, we are committed to providing reasonable adjustments where required. If you require a reasonable adjustment to be made during your process, please let your Talent Partner know. We encourage you to share this information, but there is no obligation to do so. Please be reassured that any reasonable adjustment requests will not be taken into account when making a decision about your candidacy.