Fullstack Software Engineer

One way of viewing what we’re building at Tract is an abstraction layer over regulation, first, and democratic processes, second. So a huge amount of our software is about parsing and structuring the textual and the unstructured.

As a software engineer, you will spend a large part of your day thinking about this problem, and solving it, with an eye to scalability. To the extent it’s practical, we want to build a general-purpose system, something that can ride smoothly over the vicissitudes and roughness of the real world.

Both founders are technical and make up the current software team, so you’ll be working directly with us to shape both the tech stack and the product.

A few things we will ask you to do in your first few months:

• Scraping local planning documents and planning applications. People have been trying to do this for years. We are actually going to do it, and then (probably) open source it.
• Extracting structured information from them
• Build a robust data pipeline that updates from different data sources on an unpredictable timetable
• Build out the monitoring stack to make sure that all happens reliably
• Surface the relevant information for any plot of land in the country, and finesse the queries to do so, with an eye to performance
• Generate supporting documents for planning applications
• Build a state-of-the-art map rectification tool, and then (probably) open source it

You might be a good fit if:

• You embody our cultural values
• You like writing prose as well as code
• You are interested in modern approaches to NLP, such as using RAG and LLMs to help pull structured output from large corpuses of text
• You are comfortable with jumping into the frontend from time to time
• You are familiar with the various conceptual primitives of geospatial data
• You are okay with ambiguity, and take a proactive approach to resolving uncertainties

Technology stack

We have a fairly typical tech stack:

• Our frontend is written in TypeScript with React
• We use Go and Postgres for as much stuff in the backend as we can
• We fall back to Python for scraping and machine learning, because of the ecosystem.

We provision our infrastructure using Terraform and try to avoid getting locked in to any particular cloud service (in part because we have many, many startup credits to use before we commit!)

We will expect you to be familiar with these technologies, or to have a provable track record of picking up new technologies quickly.

Pay and benefits

The salary for this role is between £80k and £100k per year, plus generous equity. We’re planning on raising again in the next 12-18 months. As an early employee, you’ll have a lot of influence in helping us reach the targets we need to hit. If we get there, we plan on increasing everybody’s salaries by at least 50%.

All of our roles come with the following benefits:

• Lunch if you are in the office
• Regular team events and off-sites
• Proper budget for equipment
• And the standard stuff like pensions, a generous equity plan, Cycle to Work scheme, decent maternity and paternity, etc.