FreeAgent

FreeAgent aims to remove the stress and pain of dealing with business finances. From the very beginning in 2007, our aim was to create a product that would make an impact and improve the lives of micro-businesses in the UK. Now FreeAgent is one of the UK's most popular online accounting software providers, with over 150,000 customers.

Not to blow our own horn … but AccountingWEB even named FreeAgent the top bookkeeping product of 2020 and 2021. And in 2022 we were voted ‘Friendliest Software of the Year’ at the ICB LUCA Awards. The list could go on!

It’s not just our customers who love us, our employees do too

Find out more on Glassdoor.

We believe in the power of a collaborative, high-performing, and diverse team. We’d love you to join us on our journey.

About This Role

In this role, you would be a member of the Core Services team, part of our Architecture Group within Platform Engineering. The Core Services team are the custodians of our Ruby on Rails "Majestic Monolith" and owners of functional building blocks within the FreeAgent application, such as our Sidekiq job scheduling, subscription modelling and authentication. As a member of the team, you will have the opportunity to draw on your experience, creativity and collaboration skills to ensure we have a healthy system architecture built for the future, working closely with product and operations engineers to identify requirements and areas for improvement.

Software engineers at FreeAgent have the experience and technical expertise required to build well-tested, scalable web applications. In this role you will use this experience to design and build features, pay down technical debt, and give back by helping our less-experienced engineers develop in their roles.

We've included a general guide to our expectations below:

Mid level

Our mid level engineers help out with code review and testing. They share knowledge with other engineers through pairing, buddying new hires, or informally. They are comfortable building small features independently and work with more senior developers on larger projects, and are able to present technical solutions and discuss technical problems with the wider team.

Senior level

Senior engineers act as ambassadors for their team to the wider engineering organisation. They help other engineers with their personal development through mentoring, pairing and informal training. Seniors show technical leadership on larger projects, and can work independently while still maintaining excellent communication with the team. They also actively remove blockers for other team members.

You get to use exciting modern technologies at FreeAgent. It doesn't matter if you don't have direct experience – we have a trusted onboarding programme that will bring you up to speed. We heavily rely on the following:

• Ruby and Ruby on Rails for most of our application code
• RSpec for writing tests
• AWS for all of our infrastructure
• Docker for containerisation
• Lambda for running serverless services
• Terraform for writing infrastructure as code

You can see the full list on StackShare.

Your typical week will include:

• Designing and developing new features, and shipping them to production via our best-in-class continuous delivery platform (we deploy dozens of times a day!)
• Participating in peer review, collaborating with engineers, and sharing your experience
• Using your experience to solve real-world problems, from performance optimisations to helping to resolve production incidents
• Authoring and responding to 'request for discussion' documents which we use to collaboratively make high-impact technical decisions across engineering teams

You

Ideally you'll have:

• Previous software engineering experience, with an interest in working on the foundations and architecture of a high-traffic SaaS web app
• Willingness to collaborate and work closely with a distributed team of engineers
• Strong attention to detail - if a job is worth doing, we believe it's worth doing right.
• An unbreakable positive attitude - you embrace all challenges with a smile.
• A learning mindset - if you are committed to self-improvement, we can provide opportunities galore.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Perks

The salary bands for this opportunity span our mid level £38,000 - £57,000 per annum and our senior £57,000 - £78,000) per annum depending on experience. Salary bands are linked to performance expectations, to help nurture our culture of learning as well as fairness. A starting salary would likely leave some opportunity for growth within the band.

We pride ourselves on creating a fantastic place to work, including (but not limited to!) the following:

• 33 days holiday (and an extra day for each year you're with us)
• Flexible/hybrid working
• Private health care
• Life assurance
• 5% matched pension contributions
• Summer 4 day weeks (giving you 8 additional days off!)
• Buy-as-you-earn share schemes
• Sabbatical leave (unpaid)
• Cycle to work scheme
• Wellness webinars
• Focused learning time and learning budgets
• Volunteering day

Our work life ‍

We believe in a strong work-life balance, we don’t work long hours, and we have a fabulous Edinburgh HQ expertly designed for collaboration including high-quality A/V equipment to provide a great experience for distributed teams.

At FreeAgent, we support each other and operate a no-blame culture. Our mindset is: work hard, be nice to people, and the rest will sort itself out!

This is a permanent, full-time role - generally this means Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, but we're open to discussions on flexibility. This role will be based in our Edinburgh office, however, there will be an opportunity to adopt hybrid working, under an agreed pattern of 2 days from the office and 3 days at home each week. Working from home is second nature to us as we have been championing remote working for 16 years.

How to apply ✍

We hire smart, talented people (like you!) to make FreeAgent even better.

Our application process is simple: upload your CV and answer a few questions about why you want to work with us. Our selection process includes:

• A phone call with a member of our Talent Team
• An 'at-home' programming exercise
• Two or three video interviews

We work hard to make the process straightforward, transparent, and enjoyable.

FreeAgent is an equal opportunity employer. We strongly encourage applications from people with varied backgrounds and perspectives. All applicants are considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family or parental status.

Want to find out more? Email any queries to talent@freeagent.com