Senior Product Engineer

Location: Remote (UK-based, occasional London/Birmingham)

About us

At tiney, we're on a mission to unlock the potential of every child by building a better childcare system. We help passionate people open and run their own childminding businesses from home, and the tiney app is how they do it — education tools, payments, contracts, messaging and beyond.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Product Engineer to own real problems end to end, from the customer need or commercial "why," through the requirements and the solution, to the metric it moves.

We build AI-first because we believe it's now how the best software gets made: a small number of exceptional people focussing on the problems that matter, and not writing every line of code themselves. The judgement and accountability sit with you. You'll ship fast in the areas that are reversible and easy to change, and hold a high bar where it's safeguarding-, security- or payments-critical. We're looking to you to help us build the harness — the prompts, rules, tests, evals and guardrails — that lets a small team produce great software reliably.

What you'll be doing

• Own outcomes, not tickets.

  Take a goal (e.g. speed up onboarding, or cut invoice complaints), and scope and sequence it yourself, driving it to a measurable result in production.

• Build across the stack with AI as your daily tool.

  Decompose the work, give the agent the right context and constraints, set up the tests and evals, and own the output.

• Treat the harness as the product.

  Build the rules, evals and CI gates that make AI produce correct, on-pattern code, and close the loop on mistakes so they can't recur.

• Own the experience.

  Care about UI & UX, speed and polish; crafting quality experiences within our Design System.

• Raise the quality bar through the system.

  Help decide what's safe to ship on automated review and what needs a human — then automate that decision.

• Enable others to build.

  A growing share of tiney's internal software is built by non-engineers; you build the paths and guardrails that make that fast and safe.

• Stay close to customers.

  Speak to customers, help with technical support, and shape what you build based on real feedback.

What we're looking for

Must-haves:

• Several years shipping web/mobile products in production, at a senior level

• Product-minded — you care about the "why" and have a point of view on what's worth building, have opinions on design, and the instinct to push back or make trade-offs

• Comfortable across the stack

• Already fluent with AI-assisted development and willing to keep experimenting and learning

• Data literate and curious, and driven by the commercial outcomes of your work

• A strong communicator who's happy to lead conversations with stakeholders and customers

• UK-based, able to travel occasionally to London or Birmingham approximately once per month

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience building agent tooling or developer-productivity systems

• A background in fast-moving startups or consumer products

• Experience in our stack — TypeScript, Node.js, Expo (React and React Native), Firebase, Postgres, BigQuery, GCP

What success looks like

• 1 month:

  onboarded, first change shipped

• 3 months:

  owning a problem end to end — discovery to production — shipping a key feature and moving a metric or learning why we didn't

• 6 months:

  shaping team-level technical and product decisions; your harness work is making others faster

• 12 months:

  you've helped define both the roadmap and how we build, and shipped things that improved life for thousands of childminders and families

Our Values

We are a values driven organisation that holds children at the core and default to transparency:

• 🎈 Play is a superpower:

  our joy and creativity fuels our innovation.

• 🤔 Curious Minds See More:

  we ask why? and are always open to learning.

• 🏔️ Reach High:

  we set long term ambitious targets to achieve our ambitious goals.

• 💪 You Grow Stronger After a Fall:

  we lead with openness and trust.

• 🤗 We're Better Together:

  we are a collective of experts focussed on serving children, families and our community of childminders.

Our Behaviours

• 🧒 Children at the core:

  we design policies and products that serve the whole person.

• 💬 Default to transparency:

  honest communication builds strong teams.

What's in it for you

• Competitive salary

• A meaningful role in a mission-driven company that's shaping the future of early education

• 28 days annual leave (including a Christmas shutdown)

• Paid reflection day and birthday day off

• Both mental and physical health support

• Regular team meet-ups and off-sites

Interview Process

We move quickly and keep things simple:

1. Initial call

   — short video chat with someone from the team

2. Hiring manager interview

   — how you think about product and systems

3. Practical task

   — a real problem, done the way we work (with AI); we care as much about how you steered and checked the work as the result

4. Team chat

   — meet future teammates

5. Offer

   — we move fast once we know you're right

Our Commitment

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity, foster inclusion, and are committed to building a team that reflects the children and communities we serve.

If our mission excites you but you're not sure you meet every requirement, please apply anyway.