Senior Software Engineer

At Artifax, we build software that helps cultural organisations plan, manage, and deliver extraordinary events and programmes. We're now looking for a Senior Software Engineer to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our platform, modernising a mature enterprise product while building new, AI-powered capabilities from the ground up.

This is a senior, hands-on role with real technical ownership. You'll make architectural decisions that matter, influence how engineering is practised across the company, and help embed responsible AI into both our products and our development workflows.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work across two equally important areas:

• Building new AI-enabled products and add-ons from the ground up
• Incrementally modernising a complex PHP-based enterprise platform to keep it robust, scalable, and future-ready

You will own solutions end-to-end, from architecture and design through to cloud-native deployment and production operation. Working closely with the Product Owner and Head of Engineering, you will make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance innovation, delivery speed, security, and long-term maintainability.

AI is central to how we build. You'll help apply AI thoughtfully and responsibly within customer-facing features and internal engineering workflows.

What You'll Do

• Design and deliver end-to-end solutions across frontend, backend, and infrastructure
• Modernise targeted parts of the existing stack to reduce technical risk and improve delivery velocity
• Lead development of new product add-ons with clear commercial value
• Design AI/LLM-powered workflows with strong guardrails for security and reliability
• Build REST APIs and modular services, including scalable inference-backed services where appropriate
• Package and deploy applications using Docker/Kubernetes
• Support AWS-based deployments with a focus on reliability and scalability
• Collaborate on CI/CD pipelines and automation
• Ensure systems are scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure
• Work closely with product, leadership, and customer-facing teams
• Communicate technical trade-offs and risks clearly
• Contribute to shared patterns, documentation, and continuous improvement

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years building and maintaining production software on cloud-native platforms
• Strong backend engineering experience with modern server-side frameworks like Laravel (PHP 8.2+), alongside experience in related technologies such as TypeScript, React, Node.js, JavaScript, or Python
• Deep understanding of relational databases and complex business logic
• Experience working with complex business logic and legacy systems
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools
• Experience integrating AI or LLM-based capabilities into applications or workflows
• Solid grounding in software architecture, system design, containerisation and cloud platforms (AWS)
• Confidence working with legacy systems while driving pragmatic improvement
• Clear communication skills and a strong sense of technical ownership

Nice to Have

• Experience with microservices, security best practices, or SaaS products
• Familiarity with LLMs, RAG pipelines, or vector search
• Background in creative technology or the arts & culture sector
• Familiarity with agile development methodologies, Git-based workflows and iterative release cycles