Staff Product Engineer

ABOUT NOUS   Roughly 90% of UK households are overpaying on their bills. Nous is an agent to absorb complexity out of households, saving them money and time. Our mission is to make people’s lives simpler and fairer, starting with the 30 million households here in the UK, and soon far beyond.   Nous is growing fast, and it’s working. 20x YoY growth makes us one of the fastest scaling startups in the UK. And NPS of +70 (higher than Apple) shows that our users love it.   We’ve just launched two novel new products (on top of our current service lines). Insurance: we’re the first to get the regulatory approval and build the tech to actually do the full insurance discovery and purchase journey as an agent for the user (not just give them a link to the best deal). Subscription management: lots of companies use open banking to draw pretty graphs - we’re the first to use it to actively save people money starting by cancelling unwanted subscriptions for them.   It would be easy to look at this and think we’ve got it all figured out.   But we’ve only scratched the surface; our ambitions are SO much higher. We started with bills because ‘change begins at home’ - it’s a naturally low-interest, messy area of our lives which most of us don’t want to think about. Similar to how Amazon started with books as their first category to go after.   ‘Talk is cheap. Action is what really matters’. What we’re building is an agent to take some of the load of life, make good decisions and act for us in areas we can’t or don’t want to act on our own. For an agent, advice is cheap. Action is the product. And action means solving problems in the messy real world.     A NOTE ON PRODUCT   There’s ‘product’ as in the web application that guides our users through the complex world of bills and household admin. It acts as their interface to our management service, as well as all the behind the scenes capabilities needed to orchestrate and deliver that service - actually saving our users money and time. Try it here: app.nous.co/signup http://app.nous.co/signup (it’s free!)   Then there’s ‘product’ as experienced by our users - which is a service which makes life simple and fair. To deliver this we’ve built a set of powerful capabilities that let us run and improve the service efficiently at scale: agentic communication, multimodal data extraction, orchestration for long-running operational processes, recommendations, our own agentic harness, and more. We compose these into executable workflows that deliver real outcomes for members, like switching someone to a better energy deal without the hassle.   Today, we help manage six areas of household spending: Energy, Mobile, Broadband, Mortgage, Personal finances (e.g., managing subscriptions), and Insurance. But we’re just getting started. Behind the scenes, we’ve built the technology (we call it Blueprints) that acts as rails for us to quickly expand on the breadth and depth of our service lines. THE ROLE We already have strong Product Engineers https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nous/c4e7fba2-b3bf-460f-8389-cddb7e8182f9 who think own problems end-to-end. Some examples of the types of problems product engineers solve here: - Anton led and shipped an entire product line around open banking and subscription management three months after joining. Yes, he had support from legal, design, commercial and his team (we even became FCA registered). But one product engineer still took it from idea to a best-in-class product in the category. - Ed led the our latest Blueprint architecture, which now powers every service line. Changes to complex, long-running workflows that once took weeks can now sometimes take minutes. All safely, reliably and with full type safety. - Tim led and shipped our car insurance product line, in less than 3 months. We built a journey where an agent performs the discovery and purchase journeys - something that's not been done before and needed problem solving at the intersection of engineering, product and regulatory. - As a team, we built our own agentic harness (we call it super-engineer); it’s enabled us to build faster, investigate complex cross-system issues effectively; and it self-improves. As a Staff Product Engineer, your job is to also multiply that: to pick and lead the big, often cross-team bets that change how well we help members; e.g., how quickly a new household goes from “I think I’m overpaying” to “Nous is handling it”, how many people actually get tangible value through Nous, and how little human effort it takes behind the scenes. This is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a people-management role. You’ll spend most of your time in code, system design and product thinking - but at a scope that cuts across teams and directly shapes company direction. If you desire, there is also space and opportunity for growing into a people-management role down the line, as we grow. HOW WE BUILD We try to keep our stack simple & modern, while safe & boring in the right ways: - Full-stack TypeScript, React, Postgres, and Temporal for long-running orchestration. - Infra: AWS, Terraform, strong observability via Sentry and Datadog (full-stack, not just logs). - Data: we lean heavily on Snowflake, Omni, dbt, Fivetran, Amplitude and Segment – and we’ve even built some of our own tooling to understand how well we’re helping members. - AI: we work with messy billing and usage data, and have been building “agentic” brains that can read, reason and safely act on behalf of members. - And we use Github, Linear, Graphite, and Blacksmith every day. We choose the best tool for the job, and don’t obsess around specific technologies. We ship to production daily, favour small, reversible changes, and keep a close eye on the user impact of what we ship. WHAT YOU’LL DO First and foremost, you're a Product Engineer (please review the description there). Beyond that, you will: - Own 2–3 high-leverage bets per year. - Turn fuzzy problems into clear plans. Start from messy reality and define the problem, the metrics that matter, constraints, and a concrete technical approach. - Ship small, end-to-end slices every 1–2 weeks. Design work so that real members feel the benefit often: a new flow, a clearer explanation, a safer orchestration. Each slice has a before/after we can actually look at. - Be a domain owner in one or more critical areas (e.g. front-end, workflows/Temporal, infrastructure, agentic-AI core, data modelling). You’ll set and evolve the patterns and primitives others build on, and keep them simple, understandable and teachable. - Design “paved roads” for a small, fast team. Spot recurring problems and create stable contracts, libraries and workflows so others don’t have to reinvent them. You care about reliability and observability, but right-size them for a ~10-engineer-and-growing team. - Act as a multiplier for other engineers. Mentor emerging tech leads and seniors, embed with teams when they’re stuck, and give reviews that both catch issues and teach patterns so people leave stronger than they arrived. - Create written clarity around the work you lead. For example, for each big initiative, there’s one canonical, skimmable doc people across Product/Ops/Eng can rely on it. You’ll report directly to the CTO and work closely with Product, Ops, and rest of leadership. There aren’t many layers: how you frame problems and ship solutions will directly influence what the company does next. WHAT YEAR ONE MIGHT FEEL LIKE In your first 6–12 months, you might: - Re-design how new members see value. Take the journey from “upload a pile of bills” to “see an accurate and optimal recommendation” and cut it in half: better flows, smarter document understanding (which may require helping the user to find the right document), clearer explanations, safer automation. You’ll know it worked because more people measurably save more with Nous. - Invent and roll out a standard pattern for long-running switches. For example: “Our agent asks a user on WhatsApp for missing info → member replies on WhatsApp → our workflows pick up cleanly and continue”. You’d define the flows, error states, timeouts, logging and SLOs, build the helper libraries, and get them adopted across multiple categories with minimal custom code. - Own the front-end platform or another core domain. For example, decide how we do routing, data fetching, error handling and state management better; help engineers ship polished, accessible UI quickly; develop coding patterns that can help us, or even non-engineers, build 10-100x faster through AI-assisted coding. Throughout, you’ll be shipping code regularly, not just writing docs or drawing diagrams. HOW THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT? Compared with a Product Engineer, as Staff you: - Operate at the level of company bets, not just team projects. - Define and evolve the patterns other engineers rely on, rather than just using them. - Change how engineering works across Nous, not just within one squad. - Are expected to grow other leaders, not just ship more yourself. If that step up in scope and leverage – while staying deeply hands-on – sounds like your sweet spot, you’ll probably enjoy this. SO, … IS THIS YOU? - You’re hungry and product-obsessed: you care as much about the member outcome and UX as you do about the elegance of the system behind it. - You’ve led fuzzy, cross-functional bets before – pulling together product, ops and engineering to ship something that really moved a metric. - You get frustrated when you see wasted effort or avoidable complexity, and you naturally design paved roads so others don’t trip on the same things twice. - You’re happiest when you’re hands-on in code, but you also enjoy writing the doc, drawing the diagram, and bringing others with you. - You think in systems and primitives, not just features: contracts, workflows, failure modes, observability. - You enjoy mentoring, growing, and unblocking other engineers, can demonstrate that you’ve been effective at it, and feel a bit restless if you’re just shipping your own tickets. - You’re comfortable with our stack, and can demonstrate expertise on key parts of it. - You prefer a small, sharp, in-person team over a huge org with lots of pre-defined processes, and you’re itching for a “big unlock” moment to have outsized impact. If this resonates and you can demonstrate it, we'd love to talk to you. REMUNERATION AND BENEFITS Compelling packages, including meaningful share options with life-changing upside. We’ve raised enough money to pay real salaries. We're building something great together and we all share in the upside. If we win, we win together. An environment where you can do your best work: - 🏢 A great office set up for lots of collaborative working. We already need more whiteboards - 💻 The equipment / setup / training you need to do your best work (and of course, AI subscriptions, including Claude Code Max tier) - 🤝 A high-context environment with lots of exposure to the big decisions - be in the room when it happens (literally) - 🏡 Flexibility around remote work. If you sometimes just need to get your head down, that's fine - ☕ Very good coffee https://www.nous.co/blog/the-best-coffee-in-the-world - 🍽️ A well-stocked kitchen (featuring a wildly popular toastie maker) so you can always make yourself a breakfast or light lunch on the house - 🎉 Informal social every week, something bigger every month, plus a set-piece event in the summer and again at Christmas - we're not robots! - ✈ 33 days paid holidays (including bank holidays) - 💊 Health and dental cash plans, including an employee assistance programme - 🚴 Travel benefits, (e.g., the cycle-to-work scheme) - 💰 A generous cash referral bonus if you introduce us to someone who joins the team Nous has a…