Senior Software & Production Engineer

Lornets works with organisations when software has become commercially or operationally important and the engineering underneath it needs to be understood, strengthened or changed.

Our work spans production assurance and engineering, technical readiness, platform transition and forward deployed AI.

We work with systems that already exist. Sometimes they have grown quickly. Sometimes they are approaching enterprise use, greater scale or a more demanding production environment. Sometimes there is a specific reliability, architecture or operational problem that needs to be understood and fixed.

We are looking for a senior engineer who can get deeply into those systems and do the engineering work required to move them forward.

This is a hands-on engineering role.

You will work across application code, backend services, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines and production environments.

You should be comfortable entering a codebase you did not build, understanding the architecture and its operational behaviour, identifying what genuinely matters, and then implementing the changes required.

Some work will begin with a technical assessment. Other engagements will involve production hardening, reliability improvements, performance work, architectural changes, migrations or building production-grade capabilities around systems that have grown beyond their original foundations.

You will often work with incomplete documentation and systems whose real behaviour differs from their intended architecture.

Your job is to establish what is actually happening and improve it.

You should be an experienced software engineer who has spent substantial time working with real production systems.

Backend engineering should be one of your strengths.

We are particularly interested in experience across several of the following:

• Python, TypeScript, Java, Go, C# or similar backend languages
• Backend services and distributed systems
• REST, event-driven systems and service integrations
• System and application architecture
• PostgreSQL and other relational databases
• NoSQL and distributed data systems where appropriate
• AWS, Azure or GCP
• Docker and containerised applications
• Infrastructure as code
• CI/CD and release engineering
• Observability and production monitoring
• Performance and scalability
• Reliability and disaster recovery
• Authentication and authorisation
• Application security fundamentals
• Migrations and platform modernisation

We do not expect you to know every technology on this list.

We care much more about engineering fundamentals, production experience and your ability to understand systems you have not seen before.

You should be able to distinguish between:

• Something that looks untidy but is working perfectly well
• Technical debt that should eventually be addressed
• A genuine production risk
• A problem that requires immediate engineering intervention

Lornets does not assume that old code should be rewritten or that every monolith should become microservices.

Our principle is: Assess first. Keep what works. Change only what the evidence justifies.

Good engineering judgement matters as much as technical ability.

This is not an architecture-only position.

You should expect to open the repository, trace application behaviour, write and review code, query databases, inspect logs, work with cloud environments, investigate incidents and implement production changes.

As you become familiar with Lornets and our clients, you may take increasing technical ownership of engagements.

Lornets works directly with founders, CTOs and engineering teams.

You do not need to be a salesperson, but you should be able to explain technical problems clearly, defend your reasoning and communicate effectively in written and spoken English.

You should be comfortable working remotely with a UK-based team and collaborating during substantially overlapping UK and European working hours.

You will work closely with Lornets' senior technical team.

Senior engineers may establish the assessment, technical direction or engineering priorities for an engagement. You will have significant autonomy in investigating systems, implementing changes and contributing your own technical judgement.

We expect engineers to challenge assumptions, including ours, when the evidence supports a different conclusion.

Send us your CV or LinkedIn profile together with a short description of a production system you had to understand or improve.

Tell us:

• What the system did
• What problem you were asked to solve
• How you investigated it
• What you changed
• What happened afterwards

We are particularly interested in situations where understanding the existing system properly changed the solution you ultimately implemented.