Staff Product Engineer, nous
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3-5 days a week in office (Farringdon, London)
Intelligent assistant helping households manage their bills
Be an early applicant
Intelligent assistant helping households manage their bills
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
+ Share options
3-5 days a week in office (Farringdon, London)
21-100 employees
Company mission
To make life simpler and fairer by creating an intelligent assistant that helps UK households manage their bills, saving them money and time.
Role
Who you are
- You’re hungry and product-obsessed: you care as much about the member outcome and UX as you do about the elegance of the system behind it
- You’ve led fuzzy, cross-functional bets before – pulling together product, ops and engineering to ship something that really moved a metric
- You get frustrated when you see wasted effort or avoidable complexity, and you naturally design paved roads so others don’t trip on the same things twice
- You’re happiest when you’re hands-on in code, but you also enjoy writing the doc, drawing the diagram, and bringing others with you
- You think in systems and primitives, not just features: contracts, workflows, failure modes, observability
- You enjoy mentoring, growing, and unblocking other engineers, can demonstrate that you’ve been effective at it, and feel a bit restless if you’re just shipping your own tickets
- You’re comfortable with our stack, and can demonstrate expertise on key parts of it
- You prefer a small, sharp, in-person team over a huge org with lots of pre-defined processes, and you’re itching for a “big unlock” moment to have outsized impact
- If this resonates and you can demonstrate it, we'd love to talk to you
What the job involves
- As a Staff Product Engineer, your job is to multiply that: to pick and lead the big, often cross-team bets that change how well we help members — how quickly a new household goes from “I think I’m overpaying” to “Nous is handling it”, how many people actually get tangible value through Nous, and how little human effort it takes behind the scenes
- This is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a people-management role. You’ll spend most of your time in code, system design and product thinking - but at a scope that cuts across teams and directly shapes company direction
- If you desire, there is also space and opportunity for growing into a people-management role down the line, as we grow
- We try to keep our stack simple & modern, while safe & boring in the right ways:
- Full-stack TypeScript, React, Postgres, and Temporal for long-running orchestration
- Infra: AWS, Terraform, strong observability via Sentry and Datadog (full-stack, not just logs)
- Data: we lean heavily on Snowflake, Omni, dbt, Fivetran, Amplitude and Segment – and we’ve even built some of our own tooling to understand how well we’re helping members
- AI: we work with messy billing and usage data, and have been building “agentic” brains that can read, reason and safely act on behalf of members
- And we use Github, Linear, Graphite, and Blacksmith every day. We choose the best tool for the job, and don’t obsess around specific technologies
- We ship to production daily, favour small, reversible changes, and keep a close eye on the user impact of what we ship
- Own 2–3 high-leverage bets per year, not just projects
- Turn fuzzy problems into clear plans
- Start from messy reality — confusing renewal letters, half-complete data, stressed households — and define the problem, the metrics that matter, constraints, and a concrete technical approach
- Ship small, end-to-end slices every 1–2 weeks
- Design work so that real members feel the benefit often: a new flow, a clearer explanation, a safer orchestration. Each slice has a before/after we can actually look at
- Be a domain owner in one or more critical areas (e.g. front-end, workflows/Temporal, infrastructure, agentic-AI core, data modelling)
- You’ll set and evolve the patterns and primitives others build on, and keep them simple, understandable and teachable
- Design “paved roads” for a small, fast team
- Spot recurring problems and create stable contracts, libraries and workflows so others don’t have to reinvent them. You care about reliability and observability, but right-size them for a ~10-engineer-and-growing team
- Act as a multiplier for other engineers
- Mentor emerging tech leads and seniors, embed with teams when they’re stuck, and give reviews that both catch issues and teach patterns so people leave stronger than they arrived
- Create written clarity around the work you lead
- For example, for each big initiative, there’s one canonical, skimmable doc people across Product/Ops/Eng can rely on it
- You’ll report directly to the CTO and work closely with Product, Ops, and rest of leadership. There aren’t many layers: how you frame problems and ship solutions will directly influence what the company does next
- In your first 6–12 months, you might:
- Re-design how new members see value
- Take the journey from “upload a pile of bills” to “see an accurate and optimal recommendation” and cut it in half: better flows, smarter document understanding (which may require helping the user to find the right document), clearer explanations, safer automation. You’ll know it worked because more people measurably save more with Nous
- Invent and roll out a standard pattern for long-running switches
- For example: “Our agent asks a user on WhatsApp for missing info → member replies on WhatsApp → our workflows pick up cleanly and continue”. You’d define the flows, error states, timeouts, logging and SLOs, build the helper libraries, and get them adopted across multiple categories with minimal custom code
- Own the front-end platform or another core domain
- For example, decide how we do routing, data fetching, error handling and state management better; help engineers ship polished, accessible UI quickly; develop coding patterns that can help us — or even non-engineers — build 10-100x faster through AI-assisted coding
- Throughout, you’ll be shipping code regularly, not just writing docs or drawing diagrams
Salary benchmarks
Our take
8 out of 10 households pay much more than they need for household services. Some households overpay by thousands of pounds each year. Nous is building a new consumer service that will fundamentally change the way we run our homes, revolutionising a market worth more than £100B just in the UK.
The founding team is a bunch of seasoned entrepreneurs who have built startups from scratch through to exits for hundreds of millions of dollars. They have turned household names like Ocado into unicorns, built world-class engineering teams at Facebook, and even advised and invested in other startups, and taught entrepreneurship at Harvard. They’ve now raised one of the biggest-ever seed rounds in Europe and are set to build a business that improves the lives of millions.
Nous is an early-stage startup building a tech platform that brings together advanced decision-making heuristics and optimisation algorithms, automation technologies, and behavioural economics to make all our lives simpler and fairer.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Company benefits
- Generous equity with life-changing upside
- Stakeholder pension scheme, health and dental cash plan, employee assistance programme, cycle to work scheme, season ticket loans and more...
- Office-first culture (based out of our HQ with free food and fantastic coffee in Farringdon) but with scope to work from home as required
- Regular team socials and meals, including volunteering opportunities with local charities
- The hardware and software you need to do your best work
- 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
Company values
- Change begins at home - You have more power than you think. Start with what you can control and soon you'll see the difference we can make
- Solve for people - We're on the side of people, tackling problems households can't or don't have time to fix alone
- Action this day - We're impatient for progress, we take purposeful action each day, and we resist inertia with every step
- Tech to power - By using tech to empower people and enhance their real lives, we hope also to help redeem its reputation
- Be good company - By using tech to empower people and enhance their real lives, we hope also to help redeem its reputation
- See through - We're making business more open, transparent, and responsible. And we won't give up the fight against unfairness
Company HQ
Farringdon, London, UK
Leadership
Greg Marsh
(CEO)Founder and CEO of onefinestay, a pioneering accommodation startup they built from zero to a team of 700 and sold to a major hotel chain in a deal worth >$200m. Ex-VC @ Index & Angel investor.
Glen Walker
(COO)Co-founder, COO & CGO, and now a non-exec director at Trouva (successful marketplace startup, investors incl. Index, Local Globe, Octopus) Previously leadership team @ onefinestay, consultant @ McKinsey.
Jon Rudoe
(CCO)Ex Ocado - responsible for the whole of the retail business and scaled it 3x to £600m. Ran all of digital @ Sainsbury's. Lots of experience with mission-led companies & scaling subscription businesses.
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