Senior Software Engineer, Backoffice Platform - Ably

Our everyday digital experiences are in the middle of a realtime revolution: chatting alongside a livestream, getting realtime financial updates, or working with colleagues in a shared online space. Consumers now expect realtime as standard, and Ably powers a large part of it.

We put developers first. Our products help teams build, extend, and deliver realtime digital experiences, delivering over 700 billion messages to more than 2 billion devices every month. Teams at HubSpot, Fin, Dialpad, NASCAR, Sportsbet, and General Motors all build on Ably.

About this role

Ably's back office platform is where every customer account is managed. It holds the packages, entitlements and limits that determine what each of our customers can do, and it runs the tooling our Finance, Customer Success and Support teams rely on every day.

This is an opportunity to take ownership of a platform the whole business depends on, with the scope to decide how it should work rather than maintain someone else's decisions. You'll be hands-on across entitlements, administration tooling and billing, working closely with our Head of Infrastructure and our Developer Experience team, and directly with the teams who use what you build.

We work in an AI-first engineering culture: AI tools are part of how we plan, prototype, and iterate, though engineers own every technical decision, and human judgment is the quality bar that everything is measured against.

Day to day you will

• Run the back office platform. Look after the systems holding every customer's packages, entitlements, limits and billing, along with tooling for Finance, Customer Success, and Support.
• Solve problems, not tickets. Own the design and delivery of solutions starting from real-world user problems rather than pre-specified requirements.
• Make admin work for the people who use it. Enable staff to effortlessly view and update customer billing, packages, and limits without needing to understand internal models.
• Partner across the company. Work closely with Finance, Customer Success, Support, and Engineering to question and refine requirements.
• Champion AI-assisted development. Use LLMs and AI tools for planning, spikes, code, and documentation to accelerate velocity while retaining architectural ownership.
• Make the systems explain themselves. Ensure account limits and invoice calculations are transparent and easily understood without digging through code.
• Set the testing bar. Build testing harnesses and hold the line on production readiness where mistakes carry financial impact.

We'd love to talk if you have

• Experience working in large, established codebases, and the judgement to know when to extend, rework, or replace a system. Ruby on Rails experience is helpful, but range matters more.
• A track record of shaping architecture inside an inherited system, including data ownership decisions and drawing boundaries.
• The ability to self-start, work through ambiguity, and make good autonomous decisions.
• An AI-first mindset, viewing LLMs as productivity multipliers while applying rigorous human judgment.
• Experience making systems observable, testable, and robust.

Bonus points if you have

• Experience with usage-based billing systems (built in-house or via Orb, Metronome, or Chargebee).
• A background in platform or internal tooling teams rather than product teams.
• Experience being the engineer accountable for a system subject to financial or compliance audit.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

You'll join a team of around 60 people, working directly alongside senior engineering and leadership with no layers or bureaucracy. We are remote-first across the UK and Europe, with mandatory in-person meetups twice a year (February and August).