Senior Software Engineer (Builder)

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:

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