Powering Great Work
We started as the place to find a trusted trade. Now, as we shape the future of home improvement, we're building the tech to transform that landscape for everyone - better products, smarter data, AI where it actually helps - so trades can spend less time on admin and consumers can find someone they trust, first time. That's Powering Great Work, and it's why every team here exists:
🔧 Trades spend less time on admin and more on winning work and growing their business
🏠 Homeowners get a trusted trade, first time, every time
🚀 We get to build products that change homes and lives across the country
As our next Senior Software Engineer in Trust & Safety, you'll own the systems that decide how tradespeople are checked, how reviews are processed and how our marketplace stays honest at scale. You'll work alongside the vetting and reviews teams, who are on the front line of trust, and build the infrastructure that lets them work with confidence. When something breaks in production, you'll lead the response. When something looks brittle at design time, you'll say so.
The job, unfiltered:
Own and evolve the systems behind how tradespeople are verified, how reviews flow through our platform and how content is moderated.
Lead the response when things break: read distributed traces, correlate logs across services and find the cause, not just the symptom.
Design event-driven workflows that are reliable by default: idempotent, retryable, with dead-letter handling that doesn't need a 2am wake-up to unpick.
Work directly with the vetting and reviews teams to understand what trust means day to day, then build systems that hold up to it.
Tighten the operational seams: better monitoring, clearer alerting, locked-down auth and outbox patterns that keep data consistent.
The fit:
Strong TypeScript. You're comfortable owning a service end to end, from schema to deployment.
Fastify or a similar Node.js framework, and enough HTTP know-how that it rarely surprises you.
Event-driven instincts: you know what idempotency means in practice and why the outbox pattern exists.
Full-stack comfort, Next.js included. You ship the frontend as happily as the service behind it.
Datadog fluency (APM traces, log search, metric queries), SQL for diagnostics during an incident, and GCP basics such as Pub/Sub backlogs and DLQs.
Experience leading production incidents, not just being in them. You communicate clearly under pressure and drive to a fix.
An eye for systemic problems at review time, not at post-mortem time, and a habit of making the people around you better.
Regular use of AI tools like Cursor or Claude Code, and a keen interest in helping the team get more out of them.
You don't need to know our Trust & Safety domain yet (the review lifecycle, vetting disposition logic, publish timing). You'll pick it up. What matters is that you learn fast and take it seriously.
(Don't self-select out because you don't tick every box. We'd rather meet you.)
What you get
💰 Competitive salary, annual bonus & equity scheme
🩺 Health, wellbeing and learning support
🚲 Gym membership, Smart Tech Scheme, Cycle Scheme
🎂 Birthday/special day leave, buy & sell holiday scheme
❤️ 1 week's paid charity leave, and more
How this goes
Screening call with one of our Talent Acquisition Partners
Technical interview with members of the team
Final stage with the hiring manager and a senior stakeholder
Not this one? Stay close anyway. Join the Talent Community and we'll ping you the second something better fits.
About us
We’re Checkatrade – the UK’s leading platform for finding a tradesperson. With more than 50,000 trades listed and over 6 million reviews, we help homeowners get jobs done right and help tradespeople grow their business.
We’re growing fast, with big plans to become the go-to brand for home improvements. If you care about great work, take pride in the details, and want to make an impact, you’ll fit right in.
Skills Required
- Strong TypeScript experience and ability to own services end to end from schema through deployment
- Experience with Fastify or a similar Node.js framework and strong HTTP fundamentals
- Practical experience designing event-driven systems, including idempotency, retries, dead-letter handling, and outbox patterns
- Full-stack development experience, including Next.js
- Experience with Datadog APM traces, log search, and metric queries
- SQL experience for production diagnostics and incident investigation
- Working knowledge of GCP, including Pub/Sub backlogs and dead-letter queues
- Experience leading production incidents and driving resolution under pressure
- Ability to identify systemic issues during design and code review
- Regular use of AI development tools such as Cursor or Claude Code
What We Do
Checkatrade is one of the UK’s top online marketplaces for home improvements and repairs. Our mission is to be the trusted foundation of every home by connecting people with trades and tools to make home improvements easy – because we believe safe and happy homes improve lives, support livelihoods, and build communities. From our humble beginnings in 1998 to becoming a national household name, we’re on an exciting journey. For more than 25 years Checkatrade has stood for reputation and raising standards – whether that is for our trade members, consumers, or our colleagues. We think big and are passionate about changing the face of home improvements and repairs. Today, we are a modern online marketplace and a force for good. We strive every day to support people to improve their homes and we don’t settle for the status quo – we are evolving, innovating, and growing. With generous investment from private equity partners Brookfield, we have an ambitious growth plan and a robust roadmap to get there. Led by our values – Be All In, Always Customer Obsessed, Get It Done, Be Bold, and Do The Right Thing – we are 500 high-performing individuals working across the UK, with high-spec offices in London and Portsmouth. We are here to be the best and inspire others to do the same, and to get there we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people – so if that sounds like you, you couldn’t join at a better time!
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