Senior Software Engineer (Tech Lead)

About Us...

Permutive’s mission is to rebuild data in advertising to protect privacy. The open internet needs a sustainable foundation that funds the free & open online experiences we all rely on. Permutive’s data collaboration platform uses edge technology to securely process data where it is and AI to discover signals that drive performance—respecting consumers’ privacy preferences while delivering outcomes for publishers & advertisers.

Our customers include some of the world’s largest media companies and advertisers—including News Corp, Warner Brothers Discovery, Hearst, The Guardian, Sky, State Street, Sonos, and Apple—and we’re backed by leading investors like SoftBank Vision Fund and Y Combinator

About the Role...

Permutive is looking for a Senior Scala Engineer to join us on the journey of revolutionising the way businesses leverage their data. You'll be part of a team that creates cutting-edge solutions that empower our customers to unleash the full potential of their first-party and partner data within the Permutive platform.

You'll have the opportunity to work with a wide range of technologies, tackling complex challenges and building functionality that solves previously impossible problems for our customers, to deliver measurable value through our platform.

You’ll be eager to take full ownership of the development process from start to finish, building new product features whilst showcasing a proactive approach to coding, testing, deploying, and monitoring innovative solutions that will drive our platform forward.

This is an exciting opportunity to make a real impact on the future of data-driven marketing.

Our Teams and Technologies...

We’re 30+ engineers working to build an outstanding engineering culture so that everyone who joins has the opportunity and the support to do the best work of their life. Small, autonomous teams are important to us, and we want to empower everyone to make—and be accountable for—decisions through ownership.

Everything we build has to scale: our platform handles more requests each day than there are new tweets and Google searches, and each month we serve more than 2 billion user devices. We think applying functional programming techniques like compositionality and type-safety is the best way to build the type of massively distributed system our platform comprises, allowing us to move fast without sacrificing quality.

What we do?...

We focus on enabling our customers to leverage all their owned first-party and partner data in the Permutive platform. We are responsible for the APIs and data infrastructure which our customers and partners use to onboard data into the Permutive platform. To give an idea of the scale we operate at, our Events API ingests over 100Bi events monthly, and processes over 70k events/sec at peak times.

From a product perspective, we help our customers onboard various types of data into our platform including behavioural, contextual, modelled and declared data. We also help customers connect related data within our platform, using our Identity infrastructure. The team also collaborates closely with other product engineering teams and provides interfaces to enable them to consume onboarded data and leverage it to build new product features.

What you’ll be doing?...

As a senior member of the team, you will take a leading role in the technical delivery of our data platform. You will be responsible for guiding the team in designing and building the full lifecycle of our platform, which includes both our backend services and the APIs that power our customer-facing dashboard. Your work will directly enable users to seamlessly onboard, map, and enrich their data. You will also own our core data pipelines and underlying infrastructure, ensuring everything is scalable and reliable while mentoring engineers and championing technical excellence.

We would love to hear from Software Engineers that have knowledge or an interest in working with some of the technologies we use:

• Scala: cats, cats-effect, http4s, fs2, circe, doobie

• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Kafka, Bigtable, BigQuery, Dataflow, Airbyte, Postgres, Grafana, Terraform

What you’ll need?

• Proven experience in technical leadership, with the ability to mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and take ownership of a team's delivery.

• Understanding of functional programming and general software engineering concepts.

• Experience with Scala programming.

• Experience with designing systems that have to operate at scale.

• A strong interest in and understanding of batch and stream data processing.

• Excellent communication skills, in particular, when discussing technical concepts.

• Experience leading conversations with customers and internal stakeholders.

We'd be particularly excited if you have one or more of the below

• Experience with messaging systems (e.g. Kafka or Kinesis)

• Experience with distributed data stores (e.g. Bigtable, DynamoDB)

• Experience building and deploying microservices on Kubernetes, running on infrastructure managed as code with tools like Terraform

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP

• Familiarity with functional Scala libraries, e.g. Fs2, Http4s, Cats or Doobie

• Familiarity with stream processing frameworks, e.g. Spark, Beam, or Flink

• Familiarity with modern data warehouse or data lake architectures (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks).

What we’re offering…

We take a structured, objective approach to salary-setting, which is based on market information, our compensation strategy, and your experience and capability as assessed through our interview process. For a typical candidate who meets our requirements, we would pay between £115,000 - £130,000 + options.

Permutive Benefits...

• In this together: As a full-time employee, you'll become a shareholder with stock options, sharing in our collective success.

• Family Comes First: Primary caregivers receive up to 6 months of fully paid leave and secondary caregivers receive 3 months of fully paid leave to bond with their little ones.

• Your Time, Your Way: Flexible hours let you fit work around your life, whether it's hitting the gym, meditating, or handling family needs.

• Upgraded Workspace: A £350 budget helps you create the perfect home office setup.

• Recharge & Refocus: Unlimited paid time off (with a minimum of 25 days + public holidays) ensures you get the rest you need.

• Grow with Us: Ongoing training and development opportunities fuel your career aspirations.

• Mental Health Matters: We prioritise your well-being with free access to Spill, our mental health partner.

• Comprehensive Care: Enjoy virtual GP visits, healthcare services, work-life consultations.

• Secure your future: Our pension plan with Penfold helps you secure your financial future (employer contributes 3%, employee contributes 5%).

• A company-paid Cursor Pro subscription for all engineers.

Work Your Way

Permutive trusts you to manage your time and deliver results. Our hybrid model allows you to choose where you work best, whether in your own productive space or our London (Farringdon) or New York (Union Square) offices. That said, none of us work alone; we are part of a team. 

To foster collaboration and connection, teams in these locations come together in person at least once a week and are encouraged to benefit from being in our offices to meet with teams more often. Commercial and customer-facing teams are encouraged to embrace in-person interactions to build lasting relationships with clients and colleagues. 

Every Permutive employee gets together in person at the company’s Annual Kick Off for a week in February.  Each year’s event promises to be an exciting opportunity for us to come together, reconnect with colleagues, and align on our shared vision for the year ahead.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

At Permutive, we’re taking a thoughtful, intersectional, long-term approach to diversity, equity & inclusion. We care deeply about creating an inclusive work environment that allows everyone to flourish, and we are taking continual action to progress in that direction.

We’re committed to hiring people regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, neurodiversity status, disability status, or otherwise.