Product Engineer | Administrate

Product Engineer at Administrate

Department: Engineering | Hours: 32/week | On-Call: Required

Location: UK/Europe

Salary: £50k - £100k (£62.5k - £120k 40 hours/week equivalent)

At Administrate we’re creating the Ultimate Human Organization by building world-class software for enterprise training teams across the globe. How we work is as essential to us as what we produce. Our product is an industry-leading learning tech platform that empowers global corporate training teams and organizations to organize, plan, deliver, and measure their learning and development operations.

We're looking for product engineers with strong curiosity, proven technical skill and a desire to build delightful, high-quality engineering solutions for our customers and teams at Administrate.

Our current stack is primarily Python (Flask) on the backend and React on the frontend.

We have legacy services (which we’re modernizing) in PHP and AngularJS and integration services in Java.

What does being a “Product Engineer” mean at Administrate?

Being a product engineer means:

figuring out what customers actually want and need
writing high quality code quickly and thoughtfully
understanding that solving some customer problems may not require writing code at all
regularly taking ownership of frontend, backend, database and security engineering work
sporadically taking ownership of developer experience, product management, design, engineering management, project manager or security work

Working at Administrate

At Administrate, we’re not a typical software company.

Work-life balance matters here, and we actively protect it for each other.

Our challenges are exciting and ambitious, but we never sacrifice our team for success.

We’re looking for experienced professionals who take ownership, stay curious and continuously improve.

Working remotely wasn’t new to us with the pandemic; we’ve been a geo-distributed team since 2016.

We prefer documents, pull requests or Slack messages over meetings. That said, we know that constant work notifications outside of your working hours are bad for productivity so we don’t want or expect you to be connected 24/7. We have a shared, compensated, low-volume on-call rotation for handling out-of-hour escalations instead.

Requirements

This is what you need to have to qualify for this role. If you don't meet all of these requirements, you won't be hired.

You have paid professional experience delivering production software
You own projects end-to-end with confidence and deliver meaningful outcomes
You regularly give and receive direct, kind, and meaningful feedback
You leave code cleaner and more understandable than you found it
You make things better day-by-day by paying attention to new issues and looking for ways to simplify
You are effective in asynchronous teams and proactive when blocked
You understand that engineering time is the most precious resource for a software company and work to maximise it for yourself and others
You are willing and able to have at least 4 hours overlap with 09:00 - 17:00 UK time on work days (Monday through Thursday).

Nice-to-haves

You do not need any of these to qualify for this role. The more of these you have, the stronger your application will be.

You have worked at senior, staff+ or lead engineer level
You have formally mentored other engineers before
You have worked with Python (Flask) before
You have worked with React before
You have experience working in a remote team
You have worked on open source projects before, and can demonstrate and explain your contributions
You have given talks at technical conferences or meetups before
You have worked in a fast-moving startup environment before
You have experience using AI/LLM coding tools responsibly (i.e. “vibe engineering” not “vibe coding”)

Interview Process

Apply for the job via the link, include a CV/resume and brief cover letter explaining why you’re a good fit for the job. We cannot guarantee a response to every application. If you don’t hear from us, you didn’t make it through the first stage, sorry.
Answer written technical screening questions (not a programming exercise) over email. Anyone who gets to this stage will have a response whether they move to the next stage or whether we’re passing for now.
A 1 hour synchronous live pairing interview on a (previously resolved) bug in Administrate’s actual codebase with one of our technical engineering team leads. Open book i.e. Google, ChatGPT, LLM coding assistants are all acceptable. OpenAI Codex/Claude Code/AI agents etc. are allowed but not advised unless you’re confident in being able to “fill the silence”, demonstrate your ability and complete the problem in time.
1 hour synchronous engineering culture and values interview with CTPO.

A Day In The Life Of An Administrate Product Engineer

Start work at a time that suits you and your life but lets you attend a team standup (if any)
Read Slack backlog, emails (we definitely don’t need you to have these on your phone)
Write code, open pull requests for new features, fixing bugs, etc.
Review pull requests from coworkers and provide helpful, unblocking feedback
Merge pull requests that seem ready, ready to revert quickly if there are problems
0-2 planned meetings a day, with advance notice
0-1 unplanned meetings a day
Respond to Slack messages with colleagues at least 2-4 times a day
Write more code, open more pull requests
Make sure that your colleagues have what they need to not be blocked by you until tomorrow
Finish work at a time that suits you and your life

30 Day Goals

You have landed a customer-visible feature in the Administrate application
You have developed positive rapport and trust with your team

90 Day Goals

You have landed a non-trivial feature in the Administrate application
You have given and received feedback and done so directly yet kindly
You have proactively improved existing code, processes, or architecture where you saw opportunity

Benefits

The starting contract rate or salary for this role is between £50k - £100k (£62.5k - £120k 40 hours/week equivalent). This is a wide band; you will be compensated depending on experience, seniority and interview performance.
Those in the UK will be hired as employees, those outside as contractors. We are investigating an EOR system for hiring non-UK employees in future.
UK visa sponsorship is possible for exceptional candidates
If there’s something important we haven’t mentioned, ask us: we’re a small company and are flexible for exceptional people.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodations.

If you’ve read this far and aren’t sure you’re qualified, please apply anyway.

Looking forward to hearing from you!