Senior Full Stack Python Engineer

Technical leadership without leaving the code. You'd set the architectural direction for one area of our product, write the specifications your team builds from, and ship production Python every week.

Fully remote in Poland, or hybrid from our Kraków office. Long-term, full-time engagement on a B2B contract, invoiced monthly. 28,000 to 34,000 PLN per month excluding VAT, dependent on experience.

ABOUT VATIX

Vatix is a profitable, bootstrapped B2B SaaS company founded in London in 2018, with our engineering team in Kraków from day one. We build a governance, risk and compliance platform covering risk management, audits and inspections, incident management and compliance assurance. Over 800 organisations and more than 75,000 people use it, including Starbucks, British Airways, Dyson, Intel, Siemens, the Co-op, the NHS, Cambridge University and the University of Oxford.

We're not VC-backed and we have no plans to sell. This is a long-term, profitable business growing around 40% year on year, and we're around 30 people. Our customers depend on us for systems they cannot afford to get wrong, which sets the bar for the code we ship.

THE ROLE

This is technical leadership rather than management. You wouldn't line manage anyone, run performance reviews or own headcount. What you'd own is the technical direction of an area of the product:

• The architecture and the data model
• The design decisions, and the trade-offs behind them
• The specifications your team builds from

Core application development runs as three microteams. You'd lead one, working with one or two junior engineers, typically high-calibre graduates from top universities. Your peers are the other microteam leads and the senior engineers across the wider group, and you'd be writing production code throughout.

Since we moved to spec-driven development, the constraint on all three teams stopped being how quickly anyone writes code. It's the quality of the specification and the architecture underneath it. That's the honest reason we're hiring.

YOU'D OWN FEATURES, NOT LAYERS

The depth of the work is in the Django backend. Vatix is a single, fully multi-tenant product: one codebase, one deployment, no per-customer forks. Within that, every account configures itself to an unusual degree, with customers defining their own fields, schemas, layouts and relationships through a no-code builder. The backend has to support all of it generically, which means real work in:

• Dynamic schema design, and the query performance underneath it
• Tenant isolation that holds up with 800 organisations on one platform
• A configurable workflow engine with attribute-based routing
• Permissions down to record level
• Real-time ingestion from our lone worker safety devices

Your microteam's ownership runs through to what the customer sees, so projects will occasionally take you into React. That works because Product delivers a functional frontend prototype alongside every set of requirements, built in Claude Code against our real component library. The question in front of you is rarely "build this from nothing", it's "wire this up properly and make the calls the prototype couldn't". This is a backend role at heart and your Python and Django should be genuinely strong. What's changed is that we no longer hand half-finished features across team boundaries.

HOW WE WORK

We build with AI, and we've thought carefully about how. Our Engineering Manager has written the process up in full on our Medium publication, under the title "AI-First SDLC at Vatix". Worth ten minutes before you apply.

For any significant feature:

• Product writes a tech-agnostic PRD and builds a functional frontend prototype in Claude Code
• Your microteam turns that into a high-level technical specification: how it gets built, what the phases are, and where the genuinely hard parts are
• Phase by phase, you write the detailed spec
• Only once it's agreed does AI execute, which takes thirty to forty minutes and produces a pull request that surprises nobody, because it was specified rather than guessed

The engineering moved upstream. You'd spend more of your week on design and specification and far less on boilerplate, and edge cases surface in a markdown file rather than when a feature is 70% built. It also raises the stakes on your decisions: a sound architectural call now propagates through ten thousand lines of code in an afternoon, and so does a bad one. That's the entire reason this role is senior. We're not looking for someone to supervise a model, but for someone whose data modelling, choice of patterns and instinct for where a system will break are worth amplifying.

The quality harnesses are human, on purpose:

• You write the specs and make the design calls
• Code review is where quality is defended
• Developers test their own features before QA, and QA is an intentionally non-AI step
• Everything ships behind a feature flag

On the first project we ran this way, 4,400 lines of specification produced 10,000 lines of production code and twelve end-to-end tests, with no code written by hand and every line specified by us first. Scope grew by five tickets rather than doubling.

The process is a few months old and it will change. You'd have a real say in that, and if you've been running your own version and have views on where ours is wrong, that makes for a strong application. Healthy scepticism is welcome. Incuriosity isn't.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Strong Python and Django, including Django REST Framework, and a proper understanding of how to structure applications that scale
• Five or more years of backend engineering at a senior level, with real ownership of significant work
• Demonstrable architectural judgement. The heart of the role. You've designed non-trivial systems, you make sound decisions under uncertainty, and you can articulate the trade-offs clearly enough that others can follow the reasoning
• Appetite for technical leadership. You might already lead a small team, or be the engineer others turn to. Developing the engineers alongside you is a real part of the job, and we'd want you involved in hiring the next ones
• Willingness to see a feature through. Projects sometimes run into React. You don't need to be a frontend engineer and we won't assess you on it
• Strong written communication. Specification is writing, and unclear writing is a symptom of unclear thinking. Professional English is required
• Genuine interest in AI-assisted development. We use Claude Code and Cursor throughout. You'd direct and verify rather than accept whatever a model hands you
• Nice to have: real-time or event-driven systems, IoT, enterprise SaaS, or regulated domains

TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT

• Frontend: React on web, React Native on mobile
• Database: PostgreSQL, with a Redshift data warehouse
• Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, CI/CD
• IoT: real-time streaming via Kafka from our lone worker safety devices
• Tooling: GitHub, Linear, feature flags, Claude Code and Cursor

WHY VATIX

• Leverage. The gap between an engineer with good judgement and one without has never been wider, and here yours gets amplified rather than diluted
• Influence without management. At a larger company, the only route to more influence would be to stop building. Here your technical judgement shapes the product directly and you keep writing code
• Problems worth the seniority. A customer-configurable data model, a workflow engine, record-level permissions and real-time device ingestion, across web, mobile, IoT and the data platform underneath
• Stability without stagnation. Profitable and bootstrapped, so no runway anxiety and no pivot of the month, but small enough that there's real work to do

WHAT WE OFFER

• 28,000 to 34,000 PLN per month excluding VAT, B2B, invoiced monthly
• Fully remote in Poland, with our Kraków office available if you'd prefer hybrid. Being able to come in occasionally is a strong plus Holiday entitlement aligned with the Kodeks Pracy
• MultiSport card
• Your choice of Dell XPS (Linux) or MacBook Pro, plus the monitors and peripherals you want
• Modern tooling including AI assistants, properly paid for
• Training budget and regular growth check-ins
• Two company wide conferences each year in Kraków, including our Christmas celebration

PROCESS

The role is available immediately and the process is deliberately short:

• An initial call with our Engineering Manager
• A technical interview with one of our senior engineers
• Meeting members of the team, to make sure it's a good fit both ways

For the right person we can move to an offer within a few days. We're hiring one person for this role and the bar is high.

Vatix is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds.