Principal Software Engineer (Platform)

Principal Software Engineer 

📍 Belfast (Hybrid)  |  💰 Competitive salary + benefits 

TeamFeePay (TFP) is one of the biggest grassroots football club management platforms in the UK. We support over 2,000 football clubs and 250,000+ coaches, players, parents and guardians on the platform, and we’re now expanding into Italy, Spain and the rest of Europe. We’re a scale-up growing rapidly, and engineering is core to that growth. 

⭐ About our Engineering Team 

We're organised into three squads: Pitchside Experience, Clubhouse Experience and Platform. This role sits in Platform: the squad that builds the shared services, backend infrastructure and payments capability the rest of TFP is built on, including our move off Heroku. 

Our engineers come from a variety of different backgrounds. As long as you enjoy learning new things, we'd love to talk to you: we do not ask for formal qualifications or degree requirements for any of our engineering roles. 

🔑 Your day-to-day 

• Set architectural standards and technical strategy for TFP's backend and payments systems: decisions that need to hold up for years. 

• Lead our move off Heroku: make the platform, build-vs-buy and migration calls that shift TFP's technical trajectory, and be personally accountable for their outcomes. 

• Be the person called in on our hardest, highest-stakes backend and payments problems. 

• Shape product strategy directly for Platform, without a dedicated Head of Product to partner with: own the trade-offs between technical and business priorities yourself. 

• Level up the wider engineering org: build consensus among senior engineers on hard technical questions and grow other senior and lead engineers. 

🤩 You should apply if 

• you have experience with Ruby, software architecture, migrations, payments and leading technological change 

• you have strong experience of software development, including a background as a technical leader 

• you've led major technical migrations before, ideally including moving off a PaaS like Heroku 

• you can make the big technical bets, and are comfortable being accountable for them 

• you have experience shaping product strategy directly, without needing a Head of Product to define it for you 

• you have a product mindset: you're comfortable critiquing designs and understanding user journeys to help land on the best solution, not just implementing what's handed to you 

• you want to shape TFP's technical direction as we scale across the UK and into Europe 

This role does require hands-on Ruby on Rails experience, given its focus on our core backend architecture and payments systems. 

🛠️ What you'll be working on 

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies: 

• Ruby on Rails to write our API layer (there’s a highly recommended Rails tutorial here) 

• Postgres for our database layer 

• Stripe to power payments: membership fees, club shop and fundraising all run through it 

• Currently our infrastructure is on Heroku, but we’ll be moving off this soon: join us and help shape where 

• React Native for our mobile applications 

• We’re moving to React for our web front end, but we’re currently using Rails with Turbo, Hotwire and Stimulus 

📈 Level & career progression 

We're hiring at IC5 (Principal Engineer) on our engineering career ladder. Scope: the org / company. You'll set architectural standards and technical strategy, and be the person called in on our hardest, highest-stakes problems. We interview across the whole framework, so if you're not sure exactly what level fits, talk to your recruiter and we'll figure it out together.