Full Stack Engineer
Location: Manchester, UKContract Type: Contract Position
About the Project
Join a specialist software development team delivering a new, business-critical technology platform for an established international organisation. This greenfield development project involves modern cloud architecture, data-intensive applications, and AI-enabled capabilities. You will work as part of a multidisciplinary project team alongside experienced software, AI, infrastructure, and design professionals, with direct involvement in taking the platform from development through to production. Security, scalability, maintainability, data protection, and production readiness are key priorities throughout the project.
Role Purpose
As a Full Stack Engineer, you will build the platform's web application and the services behind it, from database schema through API to user interface. The role covers feature delivery, testing, performance, and production support. Applicants must have owned features end to end in a production system and improved them after release.
Main Responsibilities
- Application Development:
- Build and maintain features across the stack: data model, server-side logic, API, and user interface.
- Translate designs and acceptance criteria into behaviour that can be tested, including validation, empty, loading, error, and permission-restricted states.
- Write code that others can change safely: clear boundaries, useful names, and tests that describe intent.
- API and Data:
- Design APIs with explicit contracts, versioning, and error semantics.
- Model and migrate relational data safely, including backfill and rollback of a migration.
- Implement authorisation so that access decisions are enforced server-side and are auditable.
- Quality and Testing:
- Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests proportionate to risk, and keep the suite fast enough to run on every change.
- Reproduce a defect with a failing test before fixing it.
- Review colleagues' changes constructively and against the same standard.
- Performance and Reliability:
- Profile and address slow queries, excessive round trips, and oversized payloads.
- Handle partial failure explicitly: retries, timeouts, idempotency, and user-visible recovery.
- Support the service in production, including investigation of live incidents.
- Collaboration:
- Work with the UI/UX Designer on interaction detail, and with the AI engineers on the interfaces to AI capabilities.
- Agree priorities with the Technical Lead and prepare implementation-ready work ahead of sprints.
- Keep documentation and decision records current for continuity.
Requirements
- Substantial professional full stack experience on production web applications for which you were responsible.
- Strong TypeScript skills, with React and a modern server-side framework such as Next.js or Node.
- Sound relational database experience, including schema design, indexing, query tuning, and safe migration.
- Demonstrated API design experience, including contracts, versioning, and error handling.
- Practical testing discipline across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels.
- Working knowledge of authentication, authorisation, and common web security failure modes.
- Experience supporting what you build in production and acting on what you learn there.
- Able to discuss trade-offs with designers, AI engineers, and the Technical Lead.
Desirable Experience
- Experience with event-driven architecture or background job processing at scale.
- Experience integrating AI-assisted features into an application interface.
- Familiarity with accessibility requirements and component-based design systems.