Senior Software Engineer UKI

About Phorest

Would you like to create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers? Phorest Salon Software powers over 11,000 hair and beauty salons in Ireland, UK, Germany, Australia, Finland, USA, Canada, UAE and Netherlands and the platform processes 7 million appointments a month for hair and beauty consumers. Phorest is the number 1 salon software brand for premium independent salons in those markets and our next goal is to become a platform upon which other companies can build applications for premium salons.

Our system touches every point of the salon experience. We have the in‑salon software desktop application, Phorest Go (the native staff application), online bookings website for salons, and custom native apps per salon. In a typical month, Phorest processes 3 million appointments and we send over 3 million SMS and 4 million emails. We process 200k online bookings per month and over 150 custom built white‑label native apps.

Phorest is expanding its Payments solutions, delivering both online and in‑store payment experiences to thousands of businesses and staff daily. Our goal is to ensure Phorest can facilitate any type of financial transaction that occurs between our salons and their end customers. This is a technically complex and challenging domain, and one which has a huge potential impact for the future of the company.

As the Senior engineer you’ll play a hands‑on role in shaping the future of our Payments team. You’ll lead engineering efforts to make our payment systems more resilient, scalable, and ready for Embedded Finance, while improving reliability across core payment flows like in‑store and online transactions. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building and problem‑solving, takes initiative, and wants to drive meaningful improvements in a complex, high‑impact domain.

You’ll have the freedom to shape technical direction, influence the technical roadmap, and make key decisions on architecture and implementation approaches. Once the core technical challenges are under control, you’ll transition into a more product‑focused team. We’re looking for someone who brings a strong commitment to engineering best practices, enjoys mentoring others, and wants to help elevate technical standards across the team.

• Take ownership of redesigning and improvement for core components within the Payments solution in Phorest, leading the design and implementation of resilient, scalable, and maintainable systems that support future product growth.
• Tackle complex architectural and infrastructure challenges, helping to stabilise critical payment flows and prepare our systems for long‑term reliability.
• Make informed, pragmatic technical decisions with the autonomy to influence architectural direction and the technical roadmap for the team.
• Champion and apply engineering best practices (clean code, testing, maintainability, observability) and support your team in doing the same through mentorship and collaboration.
• Collaborate with product managers and designers to translate technical groundwork into product feature delivery, transitioning to a product‑focused team once core technical challenges are addressed.
• Keep a high bar for quality and craftsmanship in your day‑to‑day work, with strong attention to detail and pride in delivering robust solutions.
• Stay curious and up‑to‑date with relevant technologies and the payments industry.

• You have 5+ years of professional experience building backend systems in Java (plus other object‑oriented languages such as Kotlin is desirable), ideally in high‑throughput or transactional domains.
• You’ve worked in payments or similarly complex, high‑volume industries, and you're comfortable operating in production environments where reliability and performance are critical.
• You're experienced in designing and building distributed systems that communicate via RESTful and event‑driven (e.g. Kafka) architectures, with an emphasis on fault tolerance and observability.
• You take full ownership of your work, from design and implementation to deployment and production support, and you're comfortable…