Staff Engineer (Builder)

Famly

7d•Onsite

About The Position

Famly is hiring staff-level, backend-first Builders for two areas of its early childhood platform: Finance (Billing, Payments & Funding) and Frameworks. Builders own work end to end, shaping problems, scoping solutions, and shipping them. These roles involve working across a large, mature codebase, primarily in Scala 3, with some PHP that is being migrated away from. Famly’s systems run on AWS and Kubernetes, use MySQL, and support over a million users and around 15,000 requests per second at peak. The frontend uses React and TypeScript, and teams work full stack; although frontend expertise is not required, Builders are encouraged to follow features through to the screen when useful. The Finance role covers complex, market-specific pricing, billing, payments, debt collection, public funding, and accounting exports. The work requires careful handling of financial accuracy and regulations while allowing providers in different markets to configure services to fit their needs. The team has 14 members, including Builders, Product Managers, Designers, and a Head of Product. The role includes working with legacy PHP as part of its migration, alongside Scala. The Frameworks role builds shared foundations used across product teams, including unified child and staff profiles, configurable custom data fields, and shared data models, APIs, and patterns. It requires designing general-purpose foundations that remain useful to varied teams, with data modelling and performance as ongoing concerns. The role offers substantial influence over the team's direction and scope. Frameworks is a small team within the Enablement space, collaborating closely with other Builders across the company. Famly works with high autonomy and ownership. Builders pull work from a prioritised board, refine and frame problems, and break larger projects into shippable slices. The company uses Kanban rather than sprints or story-point estimates, sizing work by appetite. Collaboration includes daily alignment, pairing, design discussions, peer review, chapters, and guilds. Famly also experiments with AI and agentic coding and shares learnings across teams. Famly is an international company of about 180 people whose platform serves more than 10,000 institutions and over one million parents. The company describes its culture as ambitious and kind, with an emphasis on simplicity, friendliness, pace, talent, and customer impact. The role defaults to four days a week in the office, with flexibility when personal circumstances require it.

Requirements

Staff-level engineering experience, including designing systems that other engineers have built on.
Strong backend engineering depth and a technology-agnostic approach to learning unfamiliar languages and stacks.
Experience working in a large, mature codebase and being effective without a guided tour.
Experience making structural or architectural decisions and understanding how those decisions hold up over time.
Depth in an exacting area, such as financial or regulated systems, or platform engineering and data modelling at scale.
Ability to shape ambiguous problems into shippable plans without relying on a fully specified ticket.
Ability to mentor and raise the effectiveness of colleagues.
Experience changing how a team works, not only what it ships, and bringing practices from proposal to adoption.
Clear communication and the ability to keep work visible.
Comfort with autonomy, ambiguity, collaboration, and end-to-end ownership.
Curiosity about AI as an engineering tool and the experience to help a team use it thoughtfully.

Nice To Haves

Experience following backend features through to a React and TypeScript frontend.
Experience with Scala, PHP, AWS, Kubernetes, MySQL, or other technologies in Famly's stack; Famly is open to strong engineers who are not Scala experts.
Experience with AI-assisted or agentic coding workflows.

Responsibilities

Own work end to end, from shaping the problem and refining its scope through implementation and release.
Design systems and make structural decisions that other engineers and teams can build on.
Build and maintain backend systems, primarily in Scala, and work with PHP as the Finance codebase is migrated.
For Finance, develop and support pricing, plans, invoicing, payment processing, debt collection, public funding, and accounting export capabilities.
For Frameworks, build shared profiles, custom data fields, data models, APIs, and engineering patterns for use across product teams.
Make sound decisions about data modelling, performance, system quality, and appropriate levels of precision and flexibility.
Break larger projects into shippable slices and determine what is good enough and where extra care is needed.
Collaborate through problem discussions, pairing, code review, and cross-team chapters and guilds.
Mentor colleagues and help improve how teams test, review, design, and use AI.
Communicate clearly and keep work visible in a self-directed team.
Experiment with AI and agentic coding and help the team develop good judgment about their use.
When appropriate, follow features through to the React and TypeScript frontend.