Senior Software Engineer

Prodigy Finance - who are we?

Prodigy Finance is a platform that delivers socially responsible financial services; making it possible for students from more than 150 countries to fulfil their dream of studying at the world’s top universities and schools by financing their international postgraduate studies, whilst delivering competitive financial and social returns to alumni, institutional and private investors.

This borderless and innovative model enables education loan financing to students from across the globe, whilst using predicted post-degree affordability rather than present-day salary. Since 2007, Prodigy Finance has extended over US$1 billion through the platform to fund over 19,000 students.

We are funded by some of the best, pre-eminent institutions in the world including Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, RMIH, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank

What will you do in the role?

As a Senior Software Engineer joining the team at Prodigy Finance you will be exposed to the functioning of the product, operations and business development teams and you will increasingly take on a leadership and decision-making role as we craft the Prodigy Finance platform. Support more senior team members on larger projects and take ownership of smaller projects ensuring accurate and timely project delivery. Focus on strengthening internal relationships with other disciplines.

What are some of the roles and responsibilities of this role?

• Become an integral and trusted member of the tech team; be a team leader, coach and mentor, decision maker and handle a full caseload of hands-on coding/implementation projects
• Take a leadership and decision-making role in the technical architecture and implementation of the platform build. This includes project prioritization, evaluating technical debt, technical problem resolution and how to incrementally evolve a solution to reach a target architecture while delivering business value
• Execute a number of projects which contribute to the build of our platform. Take responsibility for coding core-feature implementation projects and Greenfield projects.  Make an impactful contribution, ask great questions, and execute high quality work
• Assume responsibility as a mentor and guide for more junior members of the team 
• Researching and staying abreast of key technical developments and industry trends and innovations
• Completing reasonable tasks as requested within the broad parameters of the role

What would the ideal candidate be great at?

• Technical competence; love coding, able to learn new paradigms quickly and look to continuously improve and find better ways of doing things
• Excellent critical judgement; able to make good decisions, be trusted, respected and dependable, be proactive and responsive, ask the right questions, raise flags at the right time, able to prioritize and plan workloads for the team
• Mindfulness; be considerate of the implications of your work, really care about what you are doing and the impact of your contribution
• Coaching and mentoring; teaching concepts, listening and adapting, empathy and a motivation to understand what makes others tick
• Team leading and team spirit; we are all contributing to the same platform, so be a great individual contributor but be more motivated by the leading the team to achieve - we only win if the team wins - see the impact of your own work and positively influence and help the work of others
• Getting up the front of the bus; get stuck in, execute, generate ideas, have an impact, don’t just sit back and be a passenger

Qualifications and experience

• 8+ years full stack web development using object-oriented programming languages and MVC frameworks

• Demonstrable track record of working with a relational database, for example PostgreSQL
• Professional fluency in open source tools, including github, Jenkins, and others
• Experience of cloud platform such as AWS, Google Cloud or Azure
• Experience in Agile methodologies (SCRUM)
• Capacity and inclination to learn and must be passionate about web back end development. Really passionate.

• Ideally you will have 3 years’ experience of Ruby on Rails or Python, and 8+ years general work experience. 
• Exposure to XP practices (test, TDD, pairing, CD, etc) or a passion to learn to work this way