Job Description
Senior Software Engineer
Department: Development
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Belfast
Who are we?
At Bright, we create cutting-edge software for accounting, payroll, tax, and practice management, supported by a team of talented individuals who are passionate about making a difference. Together, we lead the industry with innovative solutions and unparalleled customer support.
We’re all about creating opportunities for businesses to succeed — and for you to shine. Join us, and be part of a supportive, collaborative team that values your voice and contributions.
The Role
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the BrightPay engineering team, working on our cloud payroll platform. You will be writing C# and .NET, working with SQL, and shipping features that handle real payroll runs, tax calculations, and compliance requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
Payroll is a domain where correctness matters. Integrations with HMRC, Revenue, banks, and payment providers have hard deadlines and zero tolerance for errors — if you find that constraint interesting rather than tedious, you will thrive here.
As a senior member of a small, cross-functional team, you will lead technical decisions, mentor other engineers, and raise the bar on code quality and engineering practice.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Delivery
- Architect and implement scalable, production-ready applications across front-end and back-end, ensuring robust, efficient, and performant delivery.
- Lead technical decision-making within your squad, balancing innovation with pragmatic delivery.
- Design and build secure, high-quality back-end services integrated with our cloud platform.
- Drive best practices in code quality, testing, security, and observability across the team.
- Contribute to architectural decisions and technical strategy, shaping how we build at Bright.
Quality & Continuous Improvement
- Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code with comprehensive documentation that meets Bright’s engineering standards.
- Configure and maintain CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and deployment to support reliable software delivery.
- Identify and act on opportunities to improve development practices, tooling, code health, and maintainability across the engineering community.
- Collaborate with product managers, QA, and stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
- Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and engineering best practices.
Mentorship & Culture
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers.
- Help shape team culture and engineering standards, fostering a collaborative and high-quality delivery environment.
- Work closely within cross-functional teams to ensure consistent, high-quality software delivery.
What We're Looking For
Essential
- Significant commercial experience developing web-based applications with C# and .NET.
- Strong experience with relational databases, including writing and optimising SQL queries.
- Proven experience with cloud platforms, particularly Microsoft Azure.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical decision-making and mentor other engineers.
- Experience working in a fast-moving Agile environment.
- Strong familiarity with CI/CD practices, tools, and automated testing strategies.
- Architectural thinking — ability to design scalable systems and make sound technical trade-offs.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Desirable
- Experience building web front ends using JavaScript and modern frameworks such as React, Vue, or Blazor.
- Experience with containerisation technologies such as Docker or Kubernetes.
- Understanding of SOLID principles and software design patterns (MVVM, MVC, microservices).
- Knowledge of RESTful API design and development.
- Experience in B2B SaaS or domain-specific software (accounting, payroll, or professional services).
- Track record of mentoring engineers and driving technical standards across a team.
AI Awareness & Adoption
AI is becoming an integral part of how we work at Bright, and we want our engineers to be part of that journey. This is not an AI-specialist role, but we value an openness to AI tools and a curiosity about how they can improve the way we build software.
- Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot or similar to support coding, code review, and documentation tasks.
- An awareness of how large language models (LLMs) and AI-powered features are being applied in modern software products.
- A willingness to engage with and learn about AI capabilities as part of your ongoing professional development.
- An interest in how AI can improve development workflows, reduce toil, and support higher-quality output.
