Software Architect

The Role

We're looking for a Software Architect to join our engineering team and play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our platform. This is not just a hands-on engineering role, it's a leadership position where you'll be expected to bridge the gap between product vision and technical execution.

You'll work closely with Product Managers to translate business requirements into robust technical strategies, produce detailed technical analyses, and guide a team of engineers toward successful, on-time delivery. At the same time, you'll remain deeply hands-on, contributing directly to our codebase and setting the bar for engineering excellence across the team.

Our engineering team sits at the centre of everything we do at Plentific and is constantly tackling challenging problems, such as online payments, quoting, invoicing, booking, search and scoring algorithms, ETL, data pipelines, in-app messaging, real-time notifications, and fraud prevention. Our backend engineers mostly work with Python and Django on a service-oriented architecture deployed at scale on Kubernetes. The rest of the tech stack includes Django REST Framework, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, React.js, Docker, Redis, Celery, Pandas, NumPy, Git, Jenkins, and Elastic search.

We put significant emphasis on design patterns, code readability, automated testing, maintainability, and extensibility. As Software Architect, you'll be the standard-bearer for these values.

At Plentific AI is at the core of how we build and deliver software. We expect our Software Architect to be fluent in AI-assisted development practices, leveraging AI tools across the entire engineering lifecycle: from spec-driven development and architectural design, to coding, code review, and delivery.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with Product Managers to translate product requirements into comprehensive technical analyses, breaking down complexity into clear, actionable engineering plans with the help of AI spec-driven development tools
• Define and own the technical roadmap for your team, ensuring architectural decisions align with business goals and long-term platform scalability
• Guide and mentor engineers throughout the delivery lifecycle, from design through to deployment, ensuring the team stays on track and produces high-quality output
• Act as the primary technical point of contact for your squad, facilitating alignment between engineering, product, and stakeholders

• Design and evolve scalable, resilient microservices architectures using Django and Python, deployed on Kubernetes at scale
• Lead the design of APIs, data pipelines, and distributed systems with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and maintainability
• Define and enforce best practices around database design, query optimisation, and data modelling across relational databases (PostgreSQL)
• Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural patterns, making evidence-based recommendations to the broader engineering organisation

• Write well-formulated, testable, and readable code using appropriate software design patterns
• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, and data pipelines
• Write complex SQL queries and optimise database performance
• Debug and resolve issues across our applications, including production incidents
• Review, maintain, and refactor existing code to support improved or new features

• Champion and embed AI-assisted practices across the full development lifecycle, including spec generation, architectural design, coding, and delivery, ensuring the team operates at the frontier of modern, AI-augmented engineering

• Lead code reviews, setting a high bar for quality and consistency across the team
• Work with product owners, engineering managers, UI designers, and engineers to produce technical specifications and project documentation
• Remove technical blockers and proactively surface risks to delivery, proposing pragmatic solutions
• Write clear technical documentation for code, algorithms, APIs, and system architecture

Experience and Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on Python and Django
• Proven, hands-on experience building and operating Django-based microservices at scale, running in production on Kubernetes
• Demonstrable experience with AI tools to assist Software Development and Architectural document writing (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor).
• Demonstrable experience in a Tech Lead or Software Architect capacity, owning technical direction and guiding teams toward delivery
• Strong track record of producing technical analyses: working alongside Product Managers to assess requirements, define solutions, estimate complexity, and produce clear, actionable engineering plans
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems design, including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing (e.g. Celery, Redis), and inter-service communication patterns
• Expert-level understanding of relational database management (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design, normalisation, and query optimisation
• Solid grasp of computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and software design patterns
• Experience with AWS and cloud-native infrastructure; familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Jenkins)
• Ability to work UK working hours (+/- 3 hours)
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• A collaborative, can-do mindset with strong ownership and accountability