Software Engineer (Backend) — Pay

Phorest started in 2002 on a busy salon reception desk as a simple text-reminder tool.

Today Phorest builds software and AI-powered tools used by more than 155,000 hair, beauty and medspa professionals worldwide. We’re a product-led SaaS company solving real-world problems across bookings, payments, marketing and business management, with a big focus on building great experiences for both our salons and the people who use our products.

Everything we build helps the salon and medspa industry thrive.

We're also a Certified B Corp, and 25% of the company is owned by Phoresters. When the company grows, everyone has a stake in that.

Our ambition is to become the number one platform for premium hair, beauty and aesthetics businesses globally. For our Product & Engineering teams, that means understanding the people behind those businesses and building thoughtful, reliable products that make a real difference to how they work.

You’ll join our Checkout team, building the integrated payments experiences behind PhorestPay — from in-salon card payments and online deposits to tipping. The team connects payments with the day-to-day running of salons, spas and clinics, helping them take payments smoothly and spend less time on administration.

We’re a team that cares deeply about the salons, spas and clinics we serve, the quality of our work and each other. We start with understanding what matters to the people using our products, and work together to solve problems that make a real difference to their businesses.

As a Senior Software Engineer focused on backend engineering, you’ll help shape the next generation of PhorestPay checkout. The basket brings together the items a client is purchasing, so a salon can review the sale and take payment in one place. You’ll help strengthen the systems behind this everyday experience, making it easier to support new ways for salons to take and manage payments.

You’ll work on the backend capabilities behind experiences such as Buy Now, Pay Later, regional payment methods, and future multi-merchant revenue sharing that splits funds between salons and staff as well as new stream of Embedded Finance. This means tackling hard problems across payment flows, data modelling, integrations and reliability, while designing services that can evolve as our products grow.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll partner with Checkout, Payments Integrations, Product and Design to turn an evolving roadmap into reliable, maintainable systems. You’ll influence architecture, lead initiatives across teams, make thoughtful trade-offs and help engineers grow as we build the foundations for what comes next.

• Own key backend systems and technical domains within Pay, shaping their architecture and long-term evolution.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex backend solutions, including distributed systems, RESTful APIs and message-driven integrations.
• Break down ambiguous problems into clear approaches, identifying technical risks, dependencies and bottlenecks early.
• Work with Product, Design and engineering colleagues to shape plans and make sound trade-offs between reliability, maintainability, delivery pace and business value.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives, building alignment and communicating decisions clearly to technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Champion test-driven development, CI/CD and robust observability, using monitoring and debugging to improve the reliability and performance of our services.
• Improve engineering standards, architectural patterns and reusable approaches that help teams deliver high-quality software sustainably.
• Mentor and coach engineers, share knowledge and give constructive code-review feedback that strengthens the team’s technical thinking and output.

You’re a senior backend engineer who enjoys solving complex problems and turning them into dependable systems. You take ownership when the path isn’t clear, communicate trade-offs thoughtfully and work well across disciplines. You care about the people and businesses using your software, and you help others do their best work.

• Significant software engineering experience, typically 7+ years, with depth in backend engineering and a track record of technical leadership and meaningful impact.
• Strong proficiency in at least one object-oriented or functional language, such as Java, Kotlin or TypeScript.
• Experience designing and evolving distributed systems, RESTful APIs and message-driven integrations.
• Strong data-modelling and relational database skills, with a focus on correctness, performance and maintainability.
• Hands-on experience with test-driven development, CI/CD and observability, alongside strong debugging and monitoring skills using tools such as Honeycomb, Datadog or Grafana.
• Experience taking complex work from design through delivery, making pragmatic decisions that balance quality, speed and long-term maintainability.
• The ability to influence technical direction and work effectively across engineering, product and design in an agile environment.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising standards through coaching, code reviews and knowledge sharing.
• Engineering experience in fintech or payments would be a welcome advantage, but it’s not essential. If you bring strong backend engineering skills and curiosity about the payments space, we’d love to hear from you.

🧘 Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.

💰 As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.

🚵🏿 We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.

🦸‍♀️ We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.

🍼 We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.

🌳 We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.

🏠 Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Want to learn more about Phorest? Check out nothingventured.rocks for our blog and Insights on building an evergreen company from the team here at Phorest.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.