Engineering · We're hiring
Lead Product Engineer
£65k–£80k
Ready to build software that's accelerating the clean-energy rollout? We're looking for a Lead Product Engineer to join our small but mighty team in Bristol.
About Payaca
Payaca is the operating system for clean-energy installers, the businesses putting solar, heat pumps, battery storage and EV chargers on homes and businesses across the UK and US. We bring quoting, scheduling, job management, invoicing and compliance into one place built for how these companies actually work.
These are growing businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets and generic trade software. We give them tools designed for their world, so they can win more work, run more efficiently, and scale.
Clean energy is being installed faster than ever, and the installers doing that work are at the centre of it. The better they run, the faster it happens.
About the role
As a Lead Product Engineer you'll take responsibility for whole new products and domains, from conception to production. We're a small company, so this role carries a wide variety of responsibilities. You'll connect engineering effort to business strategy and priorities, decide which problems are worth solving, and create the clarity that lets others move fast. You'll steer architecture, make big technical bets, and help make the rest of the team better. This is a chance to have a direct impact on our product and our mission.
We're full-stack by default. You'll work across our backend monolith, and our web and mobile apps. Specialists are very welcome, but expect to touch a bit of everything, to own architecture that spans the stack.
What you'll do
- Connect engineering effort to business strategy, and create clarity for others on which problems are worth solving
- Tackle gnarly technical projects that need independent research, and define large projects in enough detail to delegate them across the team
- Build the patterns and harness that let the team hand off bigger pieces of work to agents, and help everyone around you get more out of them
- Set the quality bar for the team through review and automation
- Own the non-functional requirements in your area like security, performance and reliability
- Lead incident response
- Help the team improve through mentoring, standards and interviewing
Tech stack
Frontend
React, React Native/Expo, TypeScript, Tailwind, Figma
Backend
Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL
Infrastructure
Google Cloud Run, Firebase Hosting, Terraform, CircleCI
Developer experience
Monorepo, pnpm, MacBook Pro
AI tools
Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, Paperclip, Wispr Flow, GitHub Copilot
What we're looking for
- 5+ years building production software, with deep TypeScript experience
- Strong in either React or Node.js, with enough range across the full stack to own architecture that spans it
- Experience leading engineering projects in 3+ person teams, and defining work in enough detail for others to deliver
- A track record of owning systems in production, including their non-functional requirements
- Experience championing agentic AI tooling adoption in a team or organisation, building the patterns and harness rather than just using the tools
- Strong product and business sense, and the judgement to trade scope against value
- A high bar for quality, and the discipline to never merge code you can't stand behind, whether you or an agent wrote it, and to hold the team to the same bar
- A healthy curiosity about clean-energy installers and the businesses they run
How we work
Where we work
We're an office-first team based in central Bristol. Our office is a short walk from the harbourside, green space, and several food markets.
The whole engineering team sits together, so getting unblocked is quick and sharing ideas is easy. We favour instant, on the spot collaboration over Slack messages and recurring meetings.
Work-life balance
We aim for sustainable intensity without burnout. On rare occasions like a production incident or a critical launch, we may need to work outside of normal hours, but this is the exception. When we breach a sustainable pace, we treat the cause as a problem to fix.
You manage your own time, too. Errands, appointments and life admin during the day don't need approval or apology, as long as the work gets done.
Our philosophy on AI
AI is not a side project here, it is how we work. We've built an organisation of AI agents that runs alongside the human team. They sync our data, handle the tedious updates that used to eat whole afternoons, surface what actually needs a human, and even coach us with feedback on our own work. The result is that you spend your time on the things that genuinely need you, not on admin a machine should be doing.
You'll be expected to use these tools every day, to lean on them hard, push their limits, and help us find the next thing they can take off our plates. We're genuinely at the edge of AI tooling adoption and we move fast. If that excites you, you'll love it here. If the idea of working this closely with AI makes you uncomfortable, this honestly isn't the place for you, and that's okay.
In engineering, agent-driven development is the default. We delegate real, multi-step work to coding agents, manage their context carefully, and often run several at once. When an agent goes off piste, we don't just step in, we ask how can we give it the context to get it right next time. Hand-writing code line by line is increasingly the exception rather than the rule, and the nature of the job has shifted from doing the work to directing and verifying it.
That raises the bar on judgement rather than lowering it. You're accountable for everything that ships under your name, including the parts an agent produced that you didn't type yourself. The rule is simple and applies to everyone: you never merge what you can't defend. If you don't yet understand it, you build that understanding, add verification you trust, or escalate, before it goes out. We've found that this way of working produces not just better software, but better engineers as we learn on the job more than before.
Ownership
We're a small team, so you'll have real ownership of your work and the freedom and responsibility to make the key decisions yourself.
Benefits
Interview process
- 1
Meet the team (30-minute interview)
An informal chat to assess general compatibility and give you a chance to ask us questions.
- 2
Technical take-home (~2 hours + 45-minute interview)
You'll receive a dummy GitHub repository and a feature request to implement. We want to see how you work and how you approach a problem using your preferred tools, agents included. We'll then discuss your solution and its trade-offs. We'll provide a token budget for the assignment.
- 3
Technical presentation (1 hour interview)
You'll prepare a ~20 minute presentation on a technical topic of your choosing. Could be a work or hobby project, or an area you find particularly interesting. We'll finish with a Q&A. This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate you really know your stuff!
Apply for this role
Fill out the form below and we'll be in touch.
We value diverse perspectives and encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every single requirement.