Senior Software Engineer

Changing the world of pet food for good

We’re Tails.com, a dog food subscription company with a big difference. We create truly tailored food for each and every dog we serve. We start by asking people a few simple questions about their dog. Then we use that information to create their dog’s unique Tails.com recipe – so their dog gets exactly the nutrition they need, in the taste they love, delivered to their door every month. It’s clever stuff.

We are a fast-growing scale-up company, transitioning from our start-up roots and entering an exciting phase of rapid growth. As we evolve, we are focused on building a modern, scalable, and secure architecture that will support our ambitious plans for the future.

We’ve got bold plans. Having created an entirely new category in pet food, we’re now scaling fast – backed by Purina, one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards the same goals – and a bunch of smart-ish dogs, all working on their own thing.

Together, we’ll change the world of pet food for good.

Software Engineering at Tails.com
We’re a 40+ strong, diverse team of software, cloud infrastructure and quality assurance engineers distributed across 6 squads, working across the customer-facing parts of tails.com as well as factory automation and fulfilment of tens of thousands of orders per day - in 9 countries.

The role
As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be a key contributor within a cross-functional squad, delivering high-quality, scalable software that drives business impact. You’ll combine strong technical skills with the ability to influence beyond your immediate team, mentor others, and help shape how we build software at Tails.com.

You’ll work closely with your squad to design, implement, and maintain features that enhance our customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and support our growth across markets. You’ll also play a role in influencing technical direction, contributing to platform architecture, and fostering a culture of engineering excellence.

Your responsibilities
Technical delivery & quality

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and reliable systems within your squad, writing expert-level code in the languages we support in our platform

• Contribute to architectural discussions, ensuring designs align with agreed principles from Leads and Principals

• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code, and review code from peers to share knowledge and improve quality

• Help ensure the squad’s systems meet agreed performance, reliability, and security standards

Collaboration & delivery

• Work closely with your squad’s Lead Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Designer to shape and deliver solutions

• Collaborate with Principal Engineers on applying architecture patterns and technical standards

• Raise risks or issues early, and contribute to resolving them within the squad

Continuous improvement

• Suggest ways to improve how the squad delivers software, based on feedback and retrospectives

• Apply best practices in testing, CI/CD, observability, and security in your work

Mentorship & growth

• Mentor and pair with engineers in your squad to help them grow their technical skills

• Share your knowledge through documentation, demos, and informal learning sessions

Commercial awareness

• Understand how your work supports the squad’s goals and contributes to customer and business outcomes

About you

• You’re an experienced software engineer with a track record of delivering high-quality systems in a fast-paced, product-led environment

• You design and build scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions, with a mindset for future requirements

• You collaborate effectively within your squad and share knowledge or technical solutions that benefit other teams

• You contribute to architectural design within your squad, defining SLAs where relevant and proactively improving system reliability

• You challenge and adapt delivery processes when you see opportunities to improve outcomes, informed by team feedback

• You mentor engineers within your squad to support their technical growth and encourage them to participate in wider engineering discussions

• You anticipate when others need information, communicating proactively and ensuring clarity across the squad and with stakeholders

• You understand how your work supports company values and commercial goals, and you’re comfortable questioning approaches that don’t align

• You’re motivated by the opportunity to refine your skills, grow your influence, and contribute to a high-performing engineering culture in a growing scale-up

The skills you’ll bring

• Python 3 (plus Flask, Django or any other framework), with web experience
  At least one SQL dialect

• Running Docker locally and in production

• Experience with Rust, Kubernetes, event systems (especially Kafka), scaling and running high-traffic software on AWS or GCP are nice to have

• Experience working with fulfilment systems is nice to have

What's in it for you?

• Competitive salary, reviewed annually

• Annual bonus, based on company performance

• Flexible core hours, giving you true work-life balance

• Hybrid role to ensure this role works for you

• 25 days of holiday (excluding bank holidays) which increases over time to a max of 27 days

• 9/10 day working week to enhance your wellbeing without a reduction in pay and leave allowance

• Optional 5 days unpaid leave and 1 paid volunteer day each year

• When you need a change of scenery, you can work from abroad 2 weeks every 6 months

• Health insurance for you, paid by Tails.com

• Extended maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption pay. 6 months at 70% pay

• Flexible paid care leave to support immediate dependants, people close to you and pets

• In-house L&D team, with access to year-round courses to help drive your development

• 50% discount on all Tails.com

• Discounted gym membership

What’s next?
If this sounds like it matches your experience and what you’d love to do, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you’re unsure whether you fit our criteria exactly, please get in touch anyway. And because we believe that diverse teams perform better, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an underrepresented demographic.

Here’s a taster of how our recruitment process works:

1. Once you have applied, the engineering team will review your CV (we screen CVs together in small groups to avoid biases).

2. If selected, you will then have a call with someone in our software engineering team (30 mins).

3. If successful, you will be sent a tech test.

4. If successful, you will be invited to complete a 2.5 hour interview - 2x 1 hour interviews with peers and 1x 30 minute chat with our Head of Engineering.

Our Commitment
We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are underrepresented at Tails.com.

During your interview process you’ll meet some of our team with varying levels of responsibility and experience. We want to give every candidate a fair interview process and if you need any reasonable adjustments made, please let us know.