Senior Software Engineer, Foundry

hackajob is collaborating with Redgate Software to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

Senior Software Engineer, Foundry
\n At a glance

Location: Cambridge

In-office expectation: Once every two weeks

Employment type: Permanent

Salary: £55,000-£80,000

This role will be a mid or senior level engineer dependant on experience

Why this role exists

Redgate's Foundry is our innovation incubator, the team scanning the horizon for Redgate's next big opportunity. This role exists because that kind of work needs engineers who are genuinely excited by discovery: people who can form a hypothesis, test it fast, and make a clear-eyed call on whether to push forward or change course.

Most ideas won't become products. That's by design. Each experiment sharpens our thinking and improves the odds of finding the one that will. If you're motivated by that kind of challenge, where the destination isn't fixed and the work is never the same twice, this is the role for you.

About Redgate

Redgate brings together people who want to do their best work in an environment built on trust, accountability, and collaboration.

We build solutions that help data professionals securely manage the data and databases that their organisations depend on, a space that's only becoming more critical as systems scale, data regulations increase, and AI adoption accelerates.

Why join our engineering team?

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• You'll work in a team that cares about collaboration, craft and quality, not just in how we build, but in choosing what to build, finding the shortest path to the questions that matter most.
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• There's real scope to grow your skills and impact, with clear pathways and support.
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• We value sustainable delivery, good ways of working and time to improve how we build.
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About the role

The Foundry operates differently to the rest of Redgate's product teams. You won't be handed a roadmap. Instead, you'll work across the full arc of innovation — from horizon-scanning and ideation through to early-stage research, rapid prototyping, and working directly with customers to validate what you're building.

You'll be part of a small cross-functional team (a Tech Lead plus four to six Software and Machine Learning Engineers), and you'll regularly run projects in parallel: contributing to ongoing experiments while also exploring entirely new directions. The tech stack is deliberately varied, the right tool for the job, not a fixed list, spanning C#, TypeScript, Python, and more across desktop, web, API, database, and ML development.

What makes this role different:

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• You'll work on problems where there is no established answer and you'll have the autonomy to explore them seriously.
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• Your work sits at the intersection of software engineering, customer insight, and product thinking; it's rare to find all three in one role.
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• You'll use and help shape how Redgate adopts agentic coding and AI development tools, not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how the team works.
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• The scope is genuinely broad: a typical day could see you balancing technical prototypes, customer interviews, and competitor teardowns.
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What makes you a great fit

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• Proven experience using AI coding tools. You've used them extensively, understand their limitations, and have developed ways to work around them productively and safely.
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• Strong software design and coding skills across modern languages, particularly C#, TypeScript, or Python, enough to guide and review AI-generated code with confidence.
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• Hands-on experience building agentic systems using frameworks such as LangGraph, Microsoft Agentic Framework, or MCP, with a solid understanding of LLM capabilities and risks.
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• Experience designing and running experiments to validate ideas quickly, using technical prototypes, customer feedback, and lean startup principles to test assumptions and make clear decisions.
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• Comfortable engaging directly with customers and stakeholders: running interviews, demos, and concierge-style validation processes, and communicating findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
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• A product mindset; you think in terms of user value, outcomes, and market fit, not just features or technical delivery.
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What we offer

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• Salary range: £55,000-£80,000
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• Hybrid working: home and Cambridge office
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• Monthly wellbeing allowance and generous paid time off
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• Genuine investment in learning, development, and career progression
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• Private health insurance
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What happens next

Your application will be reviewed by a person, we don't use AI or automated tools to assess applications. Every profile is read by one of our Talent Partners.

You'll hear back within a few days, whether it's a next step or a no, we aim to respond promptly so you're not left wondering.

Our interview process is straightforward and consistent, you'll find more detail on our typical hiring process below, so you know what's coming and why.

Belonging at Redgate

We believe that people do their best work in an environment built on respect, fairness, and trust and that diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes. Redgate is an equal opportunity employer, and we make hiring decisions based on skill, potential, and alignment with our values.