Staff Product Engineer

ABOUT NOUS

Roughly 90% of UK households are overpaying on their bills. Nous is an agent to absorb complexity out of households, saving them money and time. Our mission is to make people’s lives simpler and fairer, starting with the 30 million households here in the UK, and soon far beyond.

Nous is growing fast, and it’s working. 20x YoY growth makes us one of the fastest scaling startups in the UK. And NPS of +70 (higher than Apple) shows that our users love it.

We’ve just launched two novel new products (on top of our current service lines). Insurance: we’re the first to get the regulatory approval and build the tech to actually do the full insurance discovery and purchase journey as an agent for the user (not just give them a link to the best deal). Subscription management: lots of companies use open banking to draw pretty graphs - we’re the first to use it to actively save people money starting by cancelling unwanted subscriptions for them.

It would be easy to look at this and think we’ve got it all figured out.

But we’ve only scratched the surface; our ambitions are SO much higher. We started with bills because ‘change begins at home’ - it’s a naturally low-interest, messy area of our lives which most of us don’t want to think about. Similar to how Amazon started with books as their first category to go after.

‘Talk is cheap. Action is what really matters’. What we’re building is an agent to take some of the load of life, make good decisions and act for us in areas we can’t or don’t want to act on our own. For an agent, advice is cheap. Action is the product. And action means solving problems in the messy real world.

A NOTE ON PRODUCT

There’s ‘product’ as in the web application that guides our users through the complex world of bills and household admin. It acts as their interface to our management service, as well as all the behind the scenes capabilities needed to orchestrate and deliver that service - actually saving our users money and time. Try it here: app.nous.co/signup http://app.nous.co/signup (it’s free!)

Then there’s ‘product’ as experienced by our users - which is a service which makes life simple and fair. To deliver this we’ve built a set of powerful capabilities that let us run and improve the service efficiently at scale: agentic communication, multimodal data extraction, orchestration for long-running operational processes, recommendations, our own agentic harness, and more. We compose these into executable workflows that deliver real outcomes for members, like switching someone to a better energy deal without the hassle.

Today, we help manage six areas of household spending: Energy, Mobile, Broadband, Mortgage, Personal finances (e.g., managing subscriptions), and Insurance. But we’re just getting started. Behind the scenes, we’ve built the technology (we call it Blueprints) that acts as rails for us to quickly expand on the breadth and depth of our service lines.

THE ROLE

We already have strong Product Engineers https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nous/c4e7fba2-b3bf-460f-8389-cddb7e8182f9 who think own problems end-to-end.

Some examples of the types of problems product engineers solve here:

• Anton led and shipped an entire product line around open banking and subscription management three months after joining. Yes, he had support from legal, design, commercial and his team (we even became FCA registered). But one product engineer still took it from idea to a best-in-class product in the category.

• Ed led the our latest Blueprint architecture, which now powers every service line. Changes to complex, long-running workflows that once took weeks can now sometimes take minutes. All safely, reliably and with full type safety.

• Tim led and shipped our car insurance product line, in less than 3 months. We built a journey where an agent performs the discovery and purchase journeys - something that's not been done before and needed problem solving at the intersection of engineering, product and regulatory.

• As a team, we built our own agentic harness (we call it super-engineer); it’s enabled us to build faster, investigate complex cross-system issues effectively; and it self-improves.

As a Staff Product Engineer, your job is to also multiply that: to pick and lead the big, often cross-team bets that change how well we help members; e.g., how quickly a new household goes from “I think I’m overpaying” to “Nous is handling it”, how many people actually get tangible value through Nous, and how little human effort it takes behind the scenes.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a people-management role. You’ll spend most of your time in code, system design and product thinking - but at a scope that cuts across teams and directly shapes company direction. If you desire, there is also space and opportunity for growing into a people-management role down the line, as we grow.

HOW WE BUILD

We try to keep our stack simple & modern, while safe & boring in the right ways:

• Full-stack TypeScript, React, Postgres, and Temporal for long-running orchestration.

• Infra: AWS, Terraform, strong observability via Sentry and Datadog (full-stack, not just logs).

• Data: we lean heavily on Snowflake, Omni, dbt, Fivetran, Amplitude and Segment – and we’ve even built some of our own tooling to understand how well we’re helping members.

• AI: we work with messy billing and usage data, and have been building “agentic” brains that can read, reason and safely act on behalf of members.

• And we use Github, Linear, Graphite, and Blacksmith every day. We choose the best tool for the job, and don’t obsess around specific technologies.

We ship to production daily, favour small, reversible changes, and keep a close eye on the user impact of what we ship.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

First and foremost, you're a Product Engineer (please review the description there). Beyond that, you will:

• Own 2–3 high-leverage bets per year.

• Turn fuzzy problems into clear plans.

Start from messy reality and define the problem, the metrics that matter, constraints, and a concrete technical approach.

• Ship small, end-to-end slices every 1–2 weeks.

Design work so that real members feel the benefit often: a new flow, a clearer explanation, a safer orchestration. Each slice has a before/after we can actually look at.

• Be a domain owner in one or more critical areas (e.g. front-end, workflows/Temporal, infrastructure, agentic-AI core, data modelling).

You’ll set and evolve the patterns and primitives others build on, and keep them simple, understandable and teachable.

• Design “paved roads” for a small, fast team.

Spot recurring problems and create stable contracts, libraries and workflows so others don’t have to reinvent them. You care about reliability and observability, but right-size them for a ~10-engineer-and-growing team.

• Act as a multiplier for other engineers.

Mentor emerging tech leads and seniors, embed with teams when they’re stuck, and give reviews that both catch issues and teach patterns so people leave stronger than they arrived.

• Create written clarity around the work you lead.

For example, for each big initiative, there’s one canonical, skimmable doc people across Product/Ops/Eng can rely on it.

You’ll report directly to the CTO and work closely with Product, Ops, and rest of leadership. There aren’t many layers: how you frame problems and ship solutions will directly influence what the company does next.

WHAT YEAR ONE MIGHT FEEL LIKE

In your first 6–12 months, you might:

• Re-design how new members see value.

Take the journey from “upload a pile of bills” to “see an accurate and optimal recommendation” and cut it in half: better flows, smarter document understanding (which may require helping the user to find the right document), clearer explanations, safer automation. You’ll know it worked because more people measurably save more with Nous.

• Invent and roll out a standard pattern for long-running switches.

For example: “