🌎 Hire Location (we can only hire for this role in the following countries): United Kingdom | Ireland | The Netherlands

About the role

Workera is an AI-native company transforming how enterprises measure and develop talent in the age of AI. We are looking for people who thrive in a fast-moving, AI-first environment — where experimentation, continuous learning, and intelligent automation are part of how we operate every day. Whether building product, driving revenue, or enabling operations, your work directly advances our mission to empower individuals and organizations to thrive by understanding, measuring, and improving their skills — across any skill — at any time.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer whose heart is in the backend — someone excited to architect and own the systems that power our AI-native platform, built on Elixir/Phoenix. At Workera, we want each one of us to be a product engineer, an empowered engineer who cares about the users, and that will make for a happy engineer. You'll join small, autonomous project teams (2–3 people) that take full ownership of a feature from scoping and prototyping through to rollout and user feedback, with the depth to contribute across the stack and the instinct to lead from the backend. AI fluency isn't optional here — you will use agentic coding and AI agents as a core part of how you work and build.

About your team

You'll join a cross-functional team operating at the intersection of generative AI, enterprise software, and talent transformation. We collaborate closely across product, engineering, go-to-market, and operations to deliver measurable value to global organizations.

Your immediate engineering team consists of four engineers, supported by a product designer, product manager, and engineering manager, all based in the EMEA region. The team values deep work and async communication — with only a few regular touchpoints each week — so you'll have plenty of uninterrupted time to build.

What You'll Do

Within 3 months, you will:

Develop a strong understanding of Workera's AI-powered platform, customers, and business model
Get up to speed on our development process and complete a scoped starter project that touches every relevant part of the codebase — with a particular focus on backend systems
Identify and begin using AI tools and agentic coding workflows to improve your personal velocity

Within 6 months, you will:

Identify opportunities to use AI tools and automation to increase leverage and impact in your function
Actively lead and deliver your first full project, owning backend architecture, build, and rollout end-to-end
Deeply understand our market position and communicate clearly in cross-functional discussions

Within 9 months, you will:

Contribute to shaping best practices in operating as an AI-first engineering organization
Architect and own backend systems that are robust, performant, and built to scale
Confidently build and ship AI-powered features, troubleshoot production issues full-stack, and shape new technical and product initiatives

*Please note as we are a dynamic and quickly growing scale-up, things are always subject to change*

What You'll Bring

7+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend specialization, in a SaaS or startup environment — full-stack capability is valued, but your heart is in the backend
Practical experience building scalable backend systems top to bottom — ideally in Elixir/Phoenix/PostgreSQL; Go, Erlang, or Clojure backgrounds also considered; a proven ability to learn new technologies quickly is a must if you don't have Elixir experience
Day-to-day use of AI tools to enhance personal productivity (e.g., Claude Code or equivalent); bonus for experience building user-facing GenAI features
Deep expertise delivering platform-critical, high-stakes backend projects where robustness, performance, and troubleshooting are non-negotiable
Strong user and customer orientation — you understand and optimize user flows, not just code
Willingness and ability to contribute on the frontend when needed (Phoenix + React)
2+ years working with a fully remote, async team
Comfort working in an AI-first environment where intelligent automation and experimentation are part of daily operations with demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, or equivalent) to improve productivity, insight generation, or decision-making
Strong systems thinking — ability to see how your backend work connects to a broader AI-driven platform and enterprise customers
Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English

The details: remote work & tech stack

You should be located in the UK, Ireland, or the Netherlands. You are free to choose working hours that suit you best, as long as there is an overlap with your team for most of the day.

Our stack primarily consists of Elixir + PostgreSQL on the backend and Phoenix on the frontend (with some pockets of React). We monitor performance using Sentry, and our platform is hosted on AWS, running on Docker containers defined in Terraform. Our platform is AI-native, and we make extensive use of LLMs in our application. Our code lives on GitHub - in fact, GitHub, Slack and Linear is where most of the collaboration happens (almost no emails get sent around). We practice using Loom to demo our work. That's the gist of it - we can dive into other technologies used when we get to know each other.

About Workera
Workera is a fast-growing, Series B Silicon Valley company redefining how enterprises understand, develop, and mobilize talent. We are an AI company building AI-native skill assessments that can measure any skill, at any time, for the world’s largest organizations. Our platform combines generative AI, adaptive testing, and rigorous measurement science to deliver trusted, defensible skill insights at enterprise scale. As AI reshapes how work is performed, Workera is redefining how work is measured. Our clients include Samsung, Siemens Energy, and the U.S. Air Force.

Our founder is Kian Katanforoosh, an award-winning Stanford Computer Science Lecturer who has taught AI to over 1 million people, and our Chairman is Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera (NYSE: COUR), CEO of DeepLearning.AI, and founding lead of the Google Brain project.

We’re learners, dreamers, and game-changers. Join us.
Workera is committed to providing an inclusive and respectful environment where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Hiring decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business need.

Senior Fullstack Engineer

Job Description