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.

The Opportunity

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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years of professional experience building backend systems in object-oriented languages such as Java, Kotlin, or Scala, 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 shipping and monitoring your own code in production.

• You have strong software craftsmanship: you care deeply about writing clean, maintainable code, follow best releasing practices, and advocate for sustainable engineering.

• You have solid experience working with relational databases, and know how to optimise queries.

• You’re familiar with AWS-based infrastructure.

• You thrive in a product-led, agile environment, and you bring a collaborative mindset when working with cross-functional teams.

• You want to be a technical leader who mentors others, raises the bar on quality and best practices, and brings people along with your ideas.

• You're someone who challenges assumptions, speaks up with thoughtful opinions, and genuinely cares about building great systems that scale.

Benefits

🧘Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.

💰As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.

🚵🏿 We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.

🦸‍♀️We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.

🍼We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.

🌳We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.

🏠Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Want to learn more about Phorest? Check out nothingventured.rocks for our blog and Insights on building an evergreen company from the team here at Phorest.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.