Software Engineer

Who Are We?

Software Engineer

A bit of background on Breathe

Located in vibrant Horsham, Breathe isn't your typical SaaS business. Private equity owned, well-funded, with 17,000 customers and an average 6 years’ LTV (a rarity in the SaaS industry), Breathe is the number 1 HR Software for SMEs in the UK. But there is more to it – our work culture is award winning, with talented people that are committed to driving impact, while having fun together. We're proud of our track record of success, but we're even more excited about what the future holds for us.

Our Values: What We Live By

Start With People - We remember our work affects real people, so we take the time to listen, understand and act with care.

Own It, Together - We take responsibility for our part, support each other through the messy bits, and focus on fixing things rather than finding blame.

Clear Is Kind - We speak honestly and with care. We don’t avoid difficult conversations, and we make sure people have the clarity they need to move forward.

Why This Role Is SO Important:

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to build the features that make the product. This is a mid-level, hands-on full-stack engineering role working across React, Node and AWS, with no ongoing people management responsibility.

This role is central to how we deliver value to customers. You’ll carry features and epics from in-progress to production, own their quality end to end, and work closely with a fast-paced squad in Horsham. You’ll also work AI-first, using tools like Claude Code and Codex to accelerate implementation while applying your own judgement to design, validation and quality.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

Let’s be clear from the start: this isn’t a role where you just pick up tickets and pass them on. You’ll own delivery from build through to production health, contribute to technical decisions, and help raise the bar for the team. You are the builder, the problem-solver, and the person making sure features ship well and stay healthy.

Driving end-to-end delivery: Delivering features and epics from in-progress to production, with clear scope, ownership and delivery within estimate.

Owning quality: Taking responsibility for tests, non-functional requirements, security and the production health of the features you ship.

Shipping safely: Releasing behind feature flags where needed, verifying post-deployment health and helping ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Supporting production: Taking part in on-call, incident response and post-mortems, and monitoring the features you’ve delivered.

Designing sensible solutions: Designing medium-complexity components with clear interfaces and separation of concerns within the team’s existing React / Node architecture.

Working AI-first: Directing AI coding agents to generate implementation and tests, while owning every line of code and validating outputs for correctness, security and architectural fit.

Writing robust code: Producing well-tested code with unit and integration coverage that works cleanly within automated quality gates.

Contributing to the wider system: Helping shape plans, ADRs and API specs, and using the ticketing system to refine requirements well.

Raising the team bar: Reviewing peers’ code thoroughly, shadowing interviews, and mentoring junior engineers through pairing and peer review.

Collaborating globally: Working closely with the global engineering team in Australia, building to shared architecture, APIs and standards across time zones.

Key Competencies & Behaviours

You Start with People: You remember the feature lands with real users and real teammates, and you give useful feedback that helps others move forward.

You Own It, Together: You take responsibility for your work and carry features through to production rather than handing them off half-done.

You believe that Clear Is Kind: You communicate clearly on technical work, document changes well, and raise blockers early instead of quietly stalling.

You’re a strong full-stack engineer: You’re comfortable with React, Node and modern web application development, and can carry a feature end to end in AWS.

You think in quality and resilience: You understand performance, reliability, scalability and secure design, and you work with established frameworks and OWASP practices.

You get leverage from tools: You know how to use AI coding agents effectively without outsourcing your judgement.

You keep things simple: You weigh existing tools, libraries and patterns before building custom, and choose the simplest path that works.

You help others improve: Juniors come to you stuck and leave able to do it themselves.

You stay customer-minded: You care about user experience and understand how each feature fits into the whole product.

Why You’ll Love It Here ❤️

✨ £50,000-£55,000 + Company Bonus

Time Off – 25 days holiday + your birthday off!

Flexible Working – Hybrid role (50% in office is our minimum, in either WeWork in Waterloo or our Horsham office)

Private Medical Insurance – Includes dental, optical & mental health cover

Life Insurance – 2x salary

Matched Pension – Salary exchange with 5% employer contribution

Access to unlimited Professional Coaching – MoreHappi

Volunteer Days – 2 per year to give back to the community

Dog-Friendly Office – Bring your four-legged friend!

Access to Mintago – Exclusive financial wellbeing through discounts and expert advice

The Hiring Process: Let’s Make it Personal!

Screening Call: Virtual via Google Meet with one of our team to have a friendly chat, learn more about your experience, what excites you about the role, and how you align with our people-first culture.

Competency/Technical Interview: Online you’ll meet the hiring manager and we’ll dive into your technical experience, how you approach delivery, and how you balance speed, quality and ownership. This is also your chance to ask us anything about the role and company.

Final Stage Interview: In person or virtual, you’ll meet the hiring manager and members of the wider team. We’ll spend time exploring how you think about engineering quality, AI-assisted development, collaboration and getting features into production successfully.

Ready to join us? Apply Now!

Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But we'll let you in on a secret: there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. ELMO UK is a place where everyone can grow. So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to come into work every day.

ELMO UK is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to join our team. Handling sensitive employee data necessitates strict adherence to our ISO 27001:2022 Certified security policies.