Staff Engineer (Builder)

Raising a young child takes a village: families, educators, and everyone else in a child's early life. But too often those grown-ups work in isolation from each other, and from the information that would help them nurture a child together. Famly is the early childhood platform that closes that gap. One place for the adults around a child to connect, share the workload, and learn, so they can focus on the early interactions that count. For over a million parents it's how they stay close to their child's day, for educators it's how they collaborate with families and each other (and get the boring admin off their plate), and for providers it's how they run a thriving setting. All of it in service of a better start for every child.

We're looking for experienced engineers to help us make it better. We call them Builders. Right now we have two open spots, both of them backend-first, and both in the parts of Famly where the complexity is the highest.

Both are staff level: we're looking for people who've designed systems other engineers then built on, gone deep in something exacting, and made the teams around them better rather than only their own output — how we test, review, and design, and how we use AI, included.

All that being said, you'll still be surrounded by kind and clever colleagues to spar with every day.

Open positions

Finance - Billing, Payments & Funding

Fees are where a nursery's goodwill gets tested. Parents want a bill they can understand, owners want the money actually in the bank, and the person in the office wants an evening back instead of a spreadsheet reconciling government funding against 200 children's attendance. Childcare pricing is awkward by nature: fees per session and per product, sibling discounts, deposits, surcharges, credits, and public funding that changes shape in every market.

What the team takes care of

• Plans and pricing - pricing structures and bands, session and product catalogues, term dates and attendance schedules, discounts, deposits, surcharges, and the plans that turn a child's schedule into a bill

• Invoicing - invoice runs and batch reissues, billing schemes from actuals to annualised, bill payers and how one child's bill splits between them, credit notes, and balances

• Payments - card and direct debit through Stripe, autopay, parent bookings and ad hoc purchases, UK Tax-Free Childcare, and payment methods that differ market by market

• Getting paid - debt collection with overdue buckets, payment reminders, bank statement imports, and the revenue and debt reports owners run every month

• Public funding - UK funded hours, entitlements and eligibility codes, US state subsidies with parent copay, German parental contributions, and the reports that claim the money back

• Accounting exports - the chart of accounts and exports into DATEV, Sage, Xero, and QuickBooks, so the numbers land where a finance team already works

Every number here is someone's money, and a rounding error is a phone call from a parent. Precision matters, though it rarely means one right answer. Where regulation is exact (funded hours, tax rules, what a direct debit mandate allows) the code has to match it to the decimal. Everywhere else, a nursery in Berlin prices care nothing like a nursery in Ohio, so the work is giving each of them room to do it their way without handing them a blank spreadsheet. Drawing that line well, over and over, across markets, is most of the craft here.

One honest note for a backend engineer: Finance carries more of our remaining PHP than most teams, alongside a lot of Scala. Moving it across is part of the job, and it comes with the kind of ownership that only old, critical code gives you.

Finance is a team of 14. Eight Builders (plus the one we're hiring), two Product Managers, two Designers, and a Head of Product.

Frameworks - the ground every other team builds on

Some problems don't belong to any one team. They turn up on every screen, no single team owns them, and each one quietly decides how fast the rest of Famly can move. That's Frameworks. You build the foundations other Builders build on, and when they're done right, the teams using them barely have to think about them.

What the team takes care of

• Unified profiles - one profile for a child and one for a member of staff, that every corner of the product reads from and writes to

• Custom data fields - the things a provider needs to track that nobody at Famly thought to ask about, without us shipping a hardcoded bespoke field for each one

• The shared toolkit - the data models, APIs, and patterns a dozen teams build their features on, and the work of keeping them coherent as the product grows

The hard part is rarely any single feature. It's designing something general enough that six teams can use it and sharp enough that it's actually good for each of them. Get that wrong and every team routes around you. Get it right and it disappears into how Famly works. At our scale, anything cross-cutting sits on a hot path by definition, so data modelling and performance are the daily craft rather than an occasional concern.

We'll be straight about the size, because it shapes the job. Frameworks is one Builder today, and you would be the second. That means unusual influence over what gets built and how, and a scope you shape rather than inherit. It also means this isn't a big group all pushing at the same feature — the teams you build for are your closest collaborators, and there are plenty of them. But the appetite for shaping something from a standing start needs to be real.

Frameworks is a team of 3: one Builder, the Builder we're hiring, and Michael, our Director of Engineering. The team is part of the Enablement space, where a total of 6 other Builders work and social events are done together. We have ambitions to scale the team even more over time and you will be surrounded by many talented colleagues that you can spar with.

About the role

At Famly, engineers are called Builders, and it's not just a nicer word for a developer. A Builder owns work end to end: not just writing the code, but shaping the problem, scoping the solution, and shipping it. You'll work across a large and mature codebase.

Both of these roles are backend-first. Most of what you build lives in Scala (we've just upgraded to Scala 3), close to the data and the rules, and there's some PHP that we're actively migrating away from, so you'd spend time in it, but the direction of travel is clear. It runs on AWS and Kubernetes, backed by MySQL, at real scale: over a million users and around 15,000 requests per second at peak. Enough load that the hard problems are hard.

The frontend is React and TypeScript, and our teams work full stack. We're not asking you to become a frontend engineer, but the Builders who get the most done are the ones who'll follow a feature all the way to the screen rather than hand it over at the API. If you've done that before, or you'd like to, say so.

We're not looking for a Scala expert. We want a strong engineer who is curious, technology-agnostic, and not put off by an unfamiliar language — the kind who has learned several stacks over a career and knows the letters on the tin matter far less than the thinking.

How we actually work

This is where Famly differs from a lot of engineering teams, so we'll be straight about it. It suits some people brilliantly and isn't for everyone.

High autonomy, high ownership. There's no one handing you a ticket with the answer already in it. You pull work from a prioritised board and own its refinement — the problem framing, the scope, the open questions — before you build. For most tasks that means writing the problem statement yourself; for bigger projects, breaking them into shippable slices with your colleagues.

Getting it done, but knowing when done is not enough. Kanban, no sprints, no story-point estimates. We size work by appetite (how much time it's worth), not by guessing effort. Builders judge what’s good enough and what needs extra care.

We think together, not just alongside each other. Autonomy doesn't mean alone. A short daily keeps us aligned and Linear is our shared source of truth, but the real work happens in the sparring: bouncing an approach off a colleague, pairing on something gnarly, reviewing each other's work, and talking problems through before and while we build. You own your work, but you're never stuck on it by yourself.

Chapters and guilds connect us across teams. Beyond your team, Builders come together in cross-team chapters and guilds to share craft, align on how we build, and learn from each other, so good ideas and hard-won lessons don't stay trapped in one team.

AI is part of how we build

We experiment with AI and agentic coding to work faster and better, and we share openly across the teams — when someone finds a workflow that helps, they pass it on, and when something flops, we say that too. One current experiment auto-generates PRs from our error monitoring. If you're keen to help work out what AI can actually do for a real engineering team, rather than just talk about it, you'll be among people doing the same.

You'll thrive here if

• You care that the software does real good for the people using it. We call it sitting in the tiny chair.

• You've owned features end to end, and you've made structural calls that other engineers then built on top of. You've been around long enough to see which of those calls held up.

• You've gone deep in something exacting before, whether that's financial or regulated systems, or platform and data modelling at scale, so the judgement arrives with you.

• You have real backend depth and you're technology-agnostic. You learn new stacks rather than fear them. A bonus if you'll follow a feature into the frontend when it needs you.

• You've worked in a large, mature codebase and know how to be effective in one without a guided tour.

• You're comfortable with autonomy and ambiguity. You can shape a vague problem into a shippable plan without a spec handed to you.

• You can mentor and raise the people around you, and you've changed how a team works, not just what it shipped. You've taken a practice from an idea to something people actually use, and you know the difference between proposing one and landing one.

• You communicate clearly and keep your work visible, because that's what makes a self-directed team function.

• You're curious about AI as a craft multiplier, and experienced enough to help a team build good judgement about when and how to use it.

And who are Famly?

It all began when our co-founder Henrik's daughter was ready to start at daycare. He couldn't believe the amount of work being done on paper, and how distant he felt from his first child during the day. The paper 'parent' books they exchanged once a month just weren't cutting it. Together with his friend, our co-founder and CEO Anders, they set about solving that.

These days, about 180 of us build Famly for more than 10,000 institutions and over 1 million parents. We handle admin stress so they can get back to what matters, and we make it easier to connect home and nursery so parents can play a part in their child's day. If you join us, you'll be building, selling, or supporting customers with everything from staff rotas and invoices to child development and parent communication.

Famly prides itself on a few principles: we choose simplicity, we believe friendliness is a superpower, we set the pace, and we want everyone to be surrounded by talent. It adds up to a culture that refuses to make employees choose between a place that is ambitious and one that is a nice place to work. We think you can be ambitious and kind, and when you meet our team, we hope you'll agree.

What we expect of you is that you make others shine, that you believe in being better than yesterday, and that you're not afraid to just 'get it done'. Finally, we want you to value 'sitting in the tiny chair', which means you look at your work through the impact it has on our customers: the people sitting in tiny chairs in childcare settings all over the world.

What's in it for you

• Competitive pension, private health insurance, and paid maternity/paternity leave.

• A clear career framework and coaching to make sure you're growing, a 10,000 DKK personal development budget, and a 'we'll buy you any book you want' policy.

• We'll create the time, space, and leadership (as well as the budget) to make sure you grow and develop.

• We want to set the pace, and we don't cut corners when it comes to investing in the tooling and technology you need to be at the frontier of tech.

• We hire clever people who are good humans too, so Famly is full of top thinkers and generous teammates waiting to help you shine.

• A lot of ownership, both in terms of responsibility and the freedom to try new, challenging tasks.

• Top-notch work equipment, including noise cancelling headphones for those focus periods.

• We believe collaboration happens best in person, so we default to four days a week in the office, with plenty of flexibility for when life happens outside it.

Famly is an international, distributed company. Our people span several countries and our product is used all over the world.

The interview process

• Chat with the manager of the team: Moritz for Finance, Michael for Frameworks

• Rational thinking test

• Case study / skills test with panel interview

• A conversation with the Head of Product and a Builder from the team

• Reference check

We try to move fast and keep it human throughout.

The inside scoop on Famly

Wanna get to know Famly even better? Then have a look at our website to learn more about:

• our product and our mission

• our company and who we are

• our company values

• what it's like working at Famly

Want to get know more about how we work in Famly?

One of our builders, Matthew Fitzsimmons talking about how he, and the other builders are working with AI.

Our CEO, Anders Laustsen talking about embracing AI

Famly is committed to creating a more diverse, equal, and inclusive workforce, building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. It is a fundamental policy at Famly not to discriminate on any basis or characteristics and celebrate diversity. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to apply.