Contract Senior Software Engineer at Red Badger – Cape Town | Jobyssey

UK-based financial services company
Join a cross-functional team (approx. 8)
Project involves building features and functionality for a payment services platform
Kotlin backend, NodeJS and React frontend
Platform engineering, software engineering, and product delivery experience required
Start date Mid-late June 2026
2 days/week in office (Century City, Cape Town)
Ability to go permanent available

The best bit about Red Badger is, of course, the team. We are really proud of our people; we support and learn a lot from each other; we work really hard but have fun doing it. We are a diverse group comprising 22 nationalities, speaking 17 languages.

Our 3 founders, Dave, Cain and Stu, who have considerable tech and consultancy experience, still own 100% of the company. We’ve been consistently profitable and have grown responsibly from the beginning.

In 2025, we opened an office in Cape Town, South Africa. Our HQ is in London, at Old Street in the heart of “tech city”, and we get thoroughly stuck in with the brilliant community around us. We run several meetups, including the hugely popular React London, invite other groups to host their events in our office, such as Lua London and Ladies Who Code and speak at events like Digital Shoreditch and LNUG.

We follow a hybrid work approach with 2 days in the office per week (usually Wed/Thurs/Fri), with flexibility outside core hours.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our digital product delivery function to serve our prominent financial services client in the UK. Red Badger builds high-quality digital products using a lean delivery process and multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams. The work we do for our clients involves addressing the core complexities of their businesses, and the technology we employ varies from project to project.

You will be a polyglot with extensive experience across a wide range of technologies and projects, and will relish tackling and solving tough problems, digging deeper into areas you already know, as well as expanding your skills into different languages, technologies, and practices.

You’ll be comfortable designing and articulating solutions, working closely with clients to ensure we deliver the right thing, in the right way. You will lead by example, getting your hands dirty in the code, inspiring your peers & educating our clients.

You are passionate about the craft of software development and contribute to technical and non-technical discussions that help shape the direction of digital product delivery. You are able to work independently, as well as collaboratively, on user stories within an agile delivery environment and are versed in modern software delivery practices. You care about creating quality software that meets the needs of our clients’ vision and goals, in a thoughtfully pragmatic way.

As well as contributing to production-grade codebases, you will be proactive in working directly with the client to help shape and move the project forward and, where required, help upskill and embed good development practices within existing, newly formed, or client/Badger-blended cross-functional teams.

Key Responsibilities

Discipline Expertise

Providing engineering expertise and experience as a member of a cross-functional delivery team, working alongside other engineers, designers, QA, a delivery lead and a tech lead
Employ modern development practices to ship high-quality software
Ability to adapt to new languages and frameworks
Choosing the right technology for the job, striving for simplicity
Starting or continuing your journey as a line manager
Coach & support peers
Providing support for digital products once they are live (depending on client needs)

Agile Ways of Working

Pair programming with other members of the team, including designers and QAs
Own the delivery of user stories end-to-end, working with agile principles
Leading and supporting your peers in technical decisions
Be an advocate for lean software development, building for what is required now
Help break large deliverables into small, lean incremental user stories
Actively contribute to agile ceremonies

Consulting with Clients

Proactively engage with clients to shape and move the project forward, including giving updates on the delivery progress and highlighting potential technical blockers
Upskilling and embedding modern software practices in client teams where necessary

Your experience

It’d be great if you have experience with:

Frontend web technologies (e.g. Javascript, Typescript, CSS, HTML, etc.)
Frontend web frameworks (e.g. React, VueJS, etc.)
Backend technologies (e.g. C#, Node.js, Go, Rust, etc.)
Relational and Non-relational databases (e.g. ElasticSearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc.)
System architecture approaches (e.g. microservices, event sourcing, serverless, CQRS…)
Virtualisation and orchestration tools (e.g. VMs, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) and infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi)
CI/CD pipelines (e.g Jenkins, CircleCI, Github Actions, etc.)
Effective source-control management using Git
Test automation following Test Driven Development practices including unit testing, API testing, and end-to-end testing
Working with lean and agile practices (e.g. Kanban, Scrum, etc.)
Collaborating in cross-functional teams

It’d be amazing if you can also:

Make use of modern UI data layer technologies (i.e. Relay, GraphQL, Apollo, etc.)
Design, build, debug and help contribute to evolving cloud based architectures following Everything-as-Code principles
Design an agile release engineering strategy that delivers value incrementally and continuously
Support a highly-available live production system, respond to alerts, diagnose problems using logs and observability tooling, triage and resolve incidents

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Key Responsibilities

Your experience