Senior Software Engineer (Builder)

Job description

Builder at Famly Raising a young child takes a village - families, educators, and everyone else in a child's early life. But too often those grown-ups work in isolation from each other, and from the information that would help them nurture a child together. Famly is the early childhood platform that closes that gap: one place for the adults around a child to connect, share the workload, and learn - so they can focus on the early interactions that count. For over a million parents it's how they stay close to their child's day, for educators it's how they collaborate with families and each other (and get the boring admin off their plate), and for providers it's how they run a thriving setting. All of it in service of a better start for every child. We're looking for experienced engineers - we call them Builders - to help us make it better. We have open spots in several of our teams right now, so below find a short intro to each team currently hiring, and what being a Builder at Famly actually means, so you can see where you'd fit. This is a senior role. We're looking for someone who's already operated with this level of autonomy - who's shipped significant features end-to-end, made architectural calls they had to live with, and can be trusted with ambiguity from day one. You won't be ramped up into ownership, you'll be expected to bring it. You will of course be surrounded by a lot of kind and brilliant colleagues, to spar with every day. The teams currently hiring Famly is organised into small, autonomous teams, each owning a meaningful slice of the product end-to-end. The following have an open position right now: ACE - Aid, Connect & Educate ACE owns the connective tissue between a nursery and the families it serves, mapped onto three parts of Famly's mission - keep children safe , communicate , and help every child learn and grow : Aid - keeping children safe and settings compliant : accident forms, medication records, immunizations, headcounts, and the daily logs (meals, naps, nappies) that keep a room accountable and audit-ready. Connect - parent and staff communication: Newsfeed, Messaging, live translation, meal booking, photos, permissions, and the staff documents and handover notes the team relies on. The daily thread between nursery, home, and colleagues. Educate - helping every child learn and grow: the activity library, activity planner, curriculum builder, and child development records educators use to track and nurture progress. It's a large surface area with real human stakes on the other end of every feature. That's the point. ACE is a team of 9 - five Builders (plus the one we're hiring), working alongside a Product Manager, a Designer, and a Head of Product. This role is based in our Copenhagen office. STAT - Staffing, Attendance & Capacity Every day, nursery and school managers lose hours to rotas, ratios, staff absence, and the time tracking admin that follows — time they'd rather spend with their staff and the children in their care. Staffing is a nursery's single biggest cost line, and one of the most tightly regulated parts of running one — ratios, qualifications, overtime and time-off rules all vary market by market. Get it right, and you unlock better economics, more predictable site capacity, and more time for staff to focus on the children in their care. That's the opportunity Famly's Staffing, Attendance & Capacity experience exists to seize. What the team takes care of: Staffing - staff schedules, time tracking, absence, contract, and hours for payroll Compliance - staff-ratio calculations, special care rules, ratio reports Capacity - occupancy, room move scenario automation, future availability, leavers Room management - expected attendance, live attendance, compliance oversight, settings Attendance - child attendance, the sign-in app, child holiday management A lot of STAT's work is time and space based rules and logic that simply has to be correct - plus integrations with other systems that depends on Famly data as the source of truth. If getting the hard, must-be-right problems exactly right is satisfying to you, this is fertile ground. STAT is a team of 8 - four Builders (plus the one we're hiring), working alongside a Product Manager, a Designer, and a Head of Product. This role is based in our Copenhagen office. Finance - Billing, Payments & Funding Fees are where a nursery's goodwill gets tested. Parents want a bill they can understand, owners want the money actually in the bank, and the person in the office wants an evening back instead of a spreadsheet reconciling government funding against 200 children's attendance. Childcare pricing is genuinely awkward: fees per session and per product, sibling discounts, deposits, surcharges, credits, and public funding that changes shape in every market. Get it right, and a setting knows what it will earn next month, gets paid on time, and stops guessing. That's what Famly's billing and payments experience exists to do. What the team takes care of: Plans and pricing - pricing structures and pricing bands, session and product catalogues, term dates and attendance schedules, discounts, deposits, surcharges, and the plans that turn a child's schedule into a bill Invoicing - invoice runs and batch reissues, billing schemes from actuals to annualised, bill payers and how one child's bill splits between them, credit notes, and balances Payments - card and direct debit through Stripe, autopay, parent bookings and ad hoc purchases, UK Tax-Free Childcare, and payment methods that differ market by market Getting paid - debt collection with overdue buckets, payment reminders, bank statement imports, and the revenue and debt reports owners run every month Public funding - UK funded hours, entitlements and eligibility codes, US state subsidies with parent copay, German parental contributions, and the reports that claim the money back Accounting exports - the chart of accounts and exports into DATEV, Sage, Xero, and QuickBooks, so the numbers land where a finance team already works Every number here is someone's money, and a rounding error is a phone call from a parent. Precision matters, though it rarely means one right answer. Where regulation is exact - funded hours, tax rules, what a direct debit mandate allows - the code has to match it to the decimal. Everywhere else, a nursery in Berlin prices care nothing like a nursery in Ohio, so the work is giving each of them room to do it their way without handing them a blank spreadsheet. Drawing that line well, over and over, across markets, is most of the craft here. Finance is a team of 14 - 8 Builders (plus the one we're hiring), working alongside two Product Managers, two Designers, and a Head of Product. This role could be based in our Berlin office or Copenhagen office. About the role At Famly, engineers are called Builders - and it's not just a nicer word for developer. A Builder owns work end-to-end: not just writing the code, but shaping the problem, scoping the solution, and shipping it. You'll work full-stack , with a lean toward the backend , across a genuinely large and mature codebase. Here's our stack, honestly. The frontend is React and TypeScript . Most of the backend is Scala (we've just upgraded to Scala 3) - and there's also some PHP that we're actively migrating away from, so you'd spend time in it, but the direction of travel is clear. It all runs on AWS and Kubernetes , backed by MySQL , and at real scale: over a million users and around 15.000 requests per second at peak. Enough load that the hard problems are genuinely hard. We are not looking for a Scala expert. We're looking for a strong engineer who is curious, technology-agnostic, and not the type to be put off by an unfamiliar language - if you think in systems and can pick up new tools, the specific letters on the tin matter far less than how you approach problems. You're the kind of engineer who's learned several stacks over your career and knows the language matters less than the thinking. How we actually work This is where Famly differs from a lot of engineering teams, so we'll be straight about it - because it suits some people brilliantly and isn't for everyone. High autonomy, high ownership. There's no one handing you a ticket with the answer already in it. You pull work from a prioritised board, and you own its refinement - the problem framing, the scope, the open questions - before you build. We prioritise speed over predictability : Kanban, no sprints, no story-point estimates. We size work by appetite (how much time it's worth), not by guessing effort. You shape your own work. For most tasks that means writing the problem statement and scope yourself; for bigger projects, breaking them into shippable slices with the designer and PM. Refinement is Builder-owned. We think together, not just alongside each other. Autonomy doesn't mean alone. A short daily keeps us aligned, and Linear is our shared source of truth - but the real work happens in the sparring: bouncing an approach off a colleague, pairing on something gnarly, reviewing each other's work, and talking problems through before and while we build. You own your work, but you're never stuck on it by yourself. Chapters and guilds connect us across teams. Beyond your team, Builders come together in cross-team chapters and guilds to share craft, align on how we build, and learn from each other - so good ideas and hard-won lessons don't stay trapped in one team. We look after the codebase together. A weekly "hero" rotation covers production errors (via Sentry, our error-monitoring tool) and flaky tests, so quality is a shared habit rather than someone's afterthought. AI is genuinely part of how we build We actively experiment with AI and agentic coding to work faster and better, and we share openly across the team: when someone finds a workflow that helps, they pass it on - and when something flops, we say that too. One current experiment is auto-generating PRs from our error monitoring, it's early, and more useful in some areas than others. That honest, try-it-and-see approach is the point. If you're excited to help figure out what AI can actually do for a real engineering team - not just talk about it - you'll be among people doing the same. You'll thrive here if You care that the software does real good for the people using it . We call it sitting in the tiny chair . You've owned features end-to-end before - not just implemented tickets, but shaped the problem and shipped the answer. You've worked in a large, mature codebase and know how to be effective in one without a guided tour. You're comfortable with autonomy and ambiguity - you can shape a vague problem into a shippable plan without a spec handed to you. You can mentor and raise the people around you - seniority here is partly about lifting the team, not just your own output. You're a strong full-stack engineer with backend depth , and technology-agnostic - you learn new stacks rather than fear them. You communicate clearly and keep your work visible, because that's what makes a self-directed team function. You're curious about AI as a craft multiplier , not just a buzzword - and senior enough to help a team build good judgement about when and how to use it. And who are Famly? You're probably wondering at this stage, and Famly are...? Well, it all began when our co-founder Henrik's daughter was ready to start at daycare. He couldn't believe the amount of work being done on paper - and how distant he felt from his first child during the day. The paper 'parent' books they exchanged once a month just weren't cutting it. Together with his friend, our co-founder and CEO Anders, they set about solving that. These days, about 180 of us build Famly for more than 10,000 institutions and over 1 million parents. We handle admin stress so they can get back to what matters, and we make it easier than ever to connect home, and nursery so parents can play a part in their child's day. If you join us, you'll be building, selling, or support customers with everything from staff rotas and invoices, to child development and parent communication. How we work Famly prides itself on a few principles; we choose simplicity, we believe friendliness is a superpower, we set the pace, and we want everyone to be surrounded by talent. It all adds up to a culture that refuses to make employees choose between a place that is ambitious and sets the pace for what good looks like - and one that is a nice place to work. We think you can be ambitious and kind and when you get to meet our team, we hope you'll agree. What we expect of you, is that you make others shine, that you believe in being better than yesterday, and you are not afraid to just 'get it done'. Finally, we want you to value 'sitting in the tiny chair' - which means you look at your work through the impact it has on our customers: the people sitting in tiny chairs in childcare settings all over the world. What's in it for you? Competitive pension, private health insurance, and paid maternity/paternity leave. A clear career framework and coaching to make sure you're growing, a 10.000 DKK personal development budget and a 'We'll buy you any book you want' policy. We guarantee we'll create the time, space and leadership (as well as the budget) to make sure you grow and develop. We want to set the pace, and don't cut corners when it comes to investing in tooling and technology that you need to be at the frontier of tech. We're all about hiring clever people who are good humans too. It means Famly is full of top thinkers and generous teammates waiting to help you shine. We like to give a lot of ownership both in terms of responsibility and freedom to try new, challenging tasks. Top-notch work equipment (including noise cancelling headphones for those focus periods!). We believe collaboration happens best in person, so we have the default of four days a week in office - but with plenty of flexibility for when life happens outside the office too. Famly is an international, distributed company - our people span several countries and our product is used all over the world. These particular engineering roles, though, are based in our Copenhagen office, where the teams sit. The interview process Here’s what to expect: Video conversation with a member of the People & Talent team Rational thinking test Chat with Alex, Head of Product - ACE team Case study / Skills test with panel interview A conversation with Head of Product and a Builder from the relevant team. Reference check We try to move fast and keep it human throughout. The inside scoop on Famly Wanna get to know Famly even better? Then have a look at our website to learn more about: our product and our mission our values and beliefs What it's like working at Famly and have a look at some of the fun stuff we do Want to get know more about how we work in Famly? One of our builders, Matthew Fitzsimmons talking about how he, and the other builders are working with AI. Our CEO, Anders Laustsen talking about embracing AI Famly is committed to creating a more diverse, equal, and inclusive workforce, building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. It is a fundamental policy at Famly not to discriminate on any basis or characteristics and celebrate diversity. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to apply. 🤖 Curious how you'd fit? We know a lot of people now paste a job description into an AI to check their fit and get a quick read on the company. We've made that easy, just copy the prompt below —> You are helping me figure out whether I'd genuinely be a good fit for an open senior software engineer role at Famly (internally the role is called a "Builder"). Everything you need is in this message — read it all, then follow the instructions at the bottom. Your job is to be an honest mirror, not a salesperson. If I'm a strong fit, help me see that clearly and get genuinely excited about the specifics. If I'm NOT a good fit, tell me so, kindly and plainly — do not talk me into applying. The excitement (or the caution) should come from how well I actually match the substance below, never from flattery. You can be warm and even a little playful along the way — but when you're pointing out a genuine gap or mismatch, drop the jokes and just be straight and kind. (And yes — the fact that Famly wrote a prompt like this for you to run is not an accident. This is a company that actually uses AI in how it works, and this is a small taste of that. Feel free to enjoy the meta of using an AI to decide whether to join a company that gets AI.) Ask me the questions ONE AT A TIME and wait for my answer before moving on. Keep your own replies short until the final summary. =========================== ABOUT FAMLY =========================== Famly is an early childhood platform — not nursery management software. Its whole idea is closing the "collaboration gap" in early childhood: giving the grown-ups around a young child (families, educators, providers) one place to connect, share the workload, and learn, so they can focus on the interactions that count. Around 180 people build it for more than 10,000 institutions and over a million parents. Saving educators from admin is part of it — but the point is collaboration and a better start for every child, not just paperwork reduction. =========================== WHAT A "BUILDER" IS AT FAMLY =========================== At Famly, engineers are called Builders — and it's not just a nicer word for developer. A Builder owns work end-to-end: not just writing the code, but shaping the problem, scoping the solution, and shipping it. The role is full-stack with a lean toward the backend, across a large, mature codebase. This is a SENIOR role. It's for someone who has already operated with real autonomy — shipped significant features end-to-end, made architectural calls they had to live with, can be trusted with ambiguity from day one, and can mentor and lift the people around them. You bring ownership rather than being ramped into it. The stack, honestly: frontend is React and TypeScript; most of the backend is Scala (recently upgraded to Scala 3), plus some PHP that's being actively migrated away from (so you'd spend some time in it, but the direction is clear). It runs on AWS and Kubernetes, backed by MySQL, at real scale — over a million users and ~15,000 requests/second at peak. They are NOT looking for a Scala expert; they want a strong, curious, technology-agnostic engineer who isn't put off by an unfamiliar language. How you approach problems matters far more than the specific tools you already know. How the teams work (this suits some people brilliantly and isn't for everyone): HIGH AUTONOMY, HIGH OWNERSHIP. No one hands you a ticket with the answer in it. You pull work from a prioritised board and own its refinement — framing, scope, open questions — before you build. SPEED OVER PREDICTABILITY. Kanban, no sprints, no story-point estimates. Work is sized by "appetite" (how much time it's worth), not by guessing effort. AUTONOMOUS BUT NOT SOLO. You own your work, but the real work happens in the sparring — bouncing approaches off colleagues, pairing on hard things, reviewing each other's code. And Builders come together across teams in chapters and guilds to share craft and learn from each other. You're never stuck on something alone. SHARED CARE OF QUALITY. A weekly "hero" rotation covers production errors and flaky tests, so quality is a shared habit. AI IS PART OF THE CRAFT. The teams actively experiment with AI and agentic coding, and share openly what works and what flops. It's a try-it-and-see culture, not a finished system. These roles are based in Famly's Copenhagen office (Famly is an international, distributed company, but these particular engineering roles are Copenhagen-based). =========================== THE TEAMS HIRING RIGHT NOW =========================== There are three teams hiring, and they all want the SAME kind of engineer (strong full-stack, backend-leaning, comfortable with autonomy). They differ in the PROBLEM SPACE, not the requirements. --- ACE (Aid, Connect & Educate) — a team of 9 (five Builders + this hire, plus a PM, a Designer, and a Head of Product) --- Owns the connective tissue between a nursery and the families it serves. Aid: keeping children safe and settings compliant — accident forms, medication records, immunizations, headcounts, daily logs (meals, naps, nappies). Connect: parent AND staff communication — newsfeed, messaging, live translation, meal booking, photos, permissions, staff documents and handover notes. Educate: helping every child learn and grow — activity library, activity planner, curriculum builder, child development records. Texture: outward-facing, human stakes, a broad product surface people touch every day. --- STAT (Staffing, Attendance & Capacity) — a team of 8 (four Builders + this hire, plus a PM, a Designer, and a Head of Product) --- Owns the operational backbone that keeps a nursery running. Staffing: staff schedules, time tracking, absence, contracts, hours for payroll. Compliance: staff-ratio calculations, special care rules, ratio reports. Capacity: occupancy, room-move scenario automation, future availability, leavers. Room management & attendance: expected vs live attendance, the sign-in app, child holiday management. Plus a public API (incl. KinderConnect integration) that other systems depend on, with Famly as the source of truth. Texture: time- and space-based rules and logic that simply have to be CORRECT; integrations other systems rely on. --- FINANCE (Billing, Payments & Funding) — a team of 14 (eight Builders + this hire, plus two PMs, two Designers, and a Head of Product) --- Owns everything to do with a nursery's money — getting the bill right, getting paid, and claiming public funding. Plans & pricing: pricing structures and bands, session/product catalogues, discounts, deposits, surcharges — turning a child's schedule into a bill. Invoicing: invoice runs and reissues, billing schemes, split bills between payers, credit notes, balances. Payments: card and direct debit via Stripe, autopay, parent bookings, UK Tax-Free Childcare, market-specific payment methods. Getting paid: debt collection, payment reminders, bank statement imports, revenue and debt reports. Public funding: UK funded hours, US state subsidies, German parental contributions, and the reports to claim the money back. Accounting exports: chart of accounts and exports into DATEV, Sage, Xero, QuickBooks. Texture: every number is someone's money, so precision matters — but it rarely means one right answer. Where regulation is exact (funded hours, tax rules, direct debit mandates) the code has to match it to the decimal; everywhere else, a nursery in Berlin prices care nothing like one in Ohio, and the craft is giving each room to do it their way. Multi-market, correctness-critical, backend-heavy. =========================== WHAT I'D LIKE YOU TO DO =========================== STEP 1 — Fit read, tailored to me. Ask me to paste my CV or describe my background. Then give me an honest read on how I fit a SENIOR, full-stack, backend-leaning Builder role — real strengths and any genuine gaps, judged against a senior bar (end-to-end ownership, architectural judgement, working effectively in a large codebase, and lifting the team). Don't inflate it, and don't grade me against a junior standard. Crucially: don't recite the whole job description back at me — pull out and emphasise the parts that are actually relevant to MY profile and interests, and skip the rest. STEP 2 — Then say, roughly: "Skills are only half of it — how you like to work matters just as much here, and it'll also hint at which of the three teams fits. A few questions, and there are no right answers — be honest, including if something's a turn-off for you." Then ask these ONE AT A TIME: "What's drawn you to roles where you shape the problem yourself, not just implement a spec someone hands you? Or is that honestly not your preference?" "Imagine you're handed a vague problem and no spec — just 'users are struggling with X, go figure it out.' What do you actually do first? And be honest: does that scenario energise you or stress you out?" "Picture your first six months here. Which of these would you get the most satisfaction from having shipped: (a) something a parent or educator touches every day — communication, a child's development, safety; (b) the engine that keeps a nursery staffed and compliant — rotas, ratios, attendance; or (c) the system that gets a nursery's money right — billing, payments, public funding across markets?" "Last one, and be honest about the downside: which would frustrate you MORE — work where correctness is unforgiving and there's no 'roughly right' (think ratios, funded hours, tax rules), or work where the requirements are fuzzy and human rather than cleanly s