Associate Software Engineer

Associate Software Engineer

We're looking for an Associate Software Engineer to join our engineering team — someone early in their career who already builds things, and wants to learn their craft alongside ten of the best engineers in London.

Where: Hybrid. 3 days p/w in our London studio.
Interview process: 3 stages, including a practical build session where we work through a real problem together.

Everyone is welcome 🌿

We strongly believe in building a diverse and inclusive team, please don't see everything here as a 'must have'. We highly encourage applications from global majority, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neuro-divergent people, parents, carers and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. If you have any requirements or preferences that help you feel comfortable please just let us know.

About us ✈️

Planes is the product studio for the AI age, partnering with leading businesses to bring the next wave of breakthrough products to market. We're a team of thinkers and doers who care about building things that make it into the world. That means we prefer shipping code, listening to users and iterating quickly rather than long lunches and death by powerpoint. We work collaboratively with our partners to produce work that we are proud of and our clients love.

We're around 40 people, roughly ten of whom are experienced engineers. You'd be sitting with them, reviewing code with them, and learning from them every day.

🤖 AI at Planes

We recognise the enormous potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance creativity, efficiency and quality across our work. But we don't believe AI replaces craft. Quite the opposite. In a world where AI can produce almost anything, judgement, taste and product thinking matter more than ever.

This role is AI-powered by default. We don't expect you to have memorised the syntax of any particular language, and we won't test you on it. We do expect you to understand what you're building and why: how a web app and a mobile app hang together, where the data lives, what happens when it fails, and when the answer the model gave you is the wrong one. Reading and reviewing code you didn't write by hand is a core skill here, not a shortcut.

Why this role exists

The floor has risen. It's easier than it has ever been for a capable person to write working software, which means the interesting question is no longer "can you code" but "can you think". We're hiring at associate level because we want that — people who bring a different angle to a problem, who haven't yet learned which things are supposedly impossible, and who can take on the more straightforward end of supporting the products we've built while they grow into bigger work.

What you'll be doing 💫

• Support and maintenance work across the products we've built and continue to look after on retainer: fixing bugs, shipping small features, keeping things healthy.
• Working on new products and features in small teams, always with a senior engineer alongside you.
• Reading code you didn't write, in codebases you didn't start, and working out how they fit together.
• Using AI tooling heavily, and being able to explain and defend every line that ends up in a pull request.
• Talking to the rest of the team, and sometimes to clients, about what you're doing and what's in the way.
• Learning fast and deliberately — from code review, from pairing, and from the ten senior engineers around you.

You're succeeding when:

• Support tickets that used to need a senior engineer land with you and get resolved well.
• You unblock yourself more often than you're unblocked.
• Your pull requests need less and less back-and-forth.
• How we work

We hold each other to four behaviours at Planes. Here's what they look like in this role:

• High Agency. You go and find out. You read the codebase, search the docs, try the thing, and come to a senior engineer with "here's what I've tried and where I'm stuck" rather than "how do I start". You'll always have support, but you won't be waiting for it.
• Curious. You're genuinely interested in how software gets built and why it's built that way. You try new tools without being told to, and you tell the rest of us what you found.
• Standard Setter. You care whether the thing is actually good — whether it works on a bad connection, whether the empty state makes sense, whether the code will make sense to whoever opens it next.
• Energy Builder. You're good to work with. You ask questions in the open, share what you learn, and make the team better for being in it.

Requirements

• A portfolio of things you've built. This matters more than anything else on this list. A GitHub profile, a product you've shipped, a side project, a tool you made because you were annoyed by something. It doesn't need users or polish, but it needs to be yours and you need to be able to talk about the decisions in it.
• A real understanding of how modern applications fit together: client and server, APIs, data storage, authentication, deployment. You should be able to sketch the architecture of something you've built and explain the trade-offs.
• Comfort in a TypeScript/JavaScript world. Our stack is React, React Native, Node and AWS. We're not looking for depth in all of it, but you should recognise the shape of it.
• Fluent and thoughtful use of AI coding tools, plus the judgement to know when the output is wrong.
• Clear communication in writing. Much of our work happens in Slack, Notion and pull request comments.
• Good taste in product. You notice when something feels wrong to use, and you can say why.

Nice to haves

• A computer science degree, or a self-directed equivalent that you can point at.
• A career change into engineering, and the story of how you made it happen.
• Experience with mobile (React Native, iOS or Android), or with any part of AWS.
• Open source contributions, a technical blog, hackathons, a community you're part of.
• Any experience of client or agency work, however small.

We don't require a degree, a bootcamp certificate or previous commercial experience. Graduates, career changers and self-taught engineers are equally welcome.

How to apply

Send us a CV and a link to your work — GitHub, a live product, a repo, whatever represents you best. In a short paragraph, tell us about one thing you've built: what it does, one decision you'd make differently now, and why. We read these properly, and it's the part that gets you an interview.

Our benefits 🌴

• 25 days holiday, not including one extra day for your birthday and closure over Christmas
• An extra optional 20 days to take each year unpaid. This is to help you take those extended breaks
• Pension with Nest
• Personal Learning and Development budget of £250
• Access to the cycle to work scheme
• Enhanced Parental Leave. This is a gender-neutral policy where you can take up to 4 months of parental leave at full pay, at any time within the first 18 months of your child's life
• Partnership with Spill for all our team to have access to free therapy sessions