Senior II. Software Engineer

Senior II Software Engineer

D2C Domain — World of Books

Level SE4 (Senior II) | Pécs, Hungary (Remote-friendly) | Reports to: Senior Engineering Manager, D2C

About World of Books

We are World of Books, the UK's largest second-hand book retailer and a B Corporation at the heart of the

circular economy. We rescue over 35 million books a year from landfill, giving them a new life through our own

website, mobile app, and global marketplaces. With 60+ engineers based in Hungary, and product and

leadership teams across the UK and US, we build tech that scales globally while doing good for the planet.

The Opportunity

Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) is our most customer-facing and commercially critical engineering domain — the

growth engine of the business. It encompasses worldofbooks.com (our primary eCommerce storefront), the

World of Books mobile app (iOS & Android), and the platforms that power catalogue, inventory, pricing and

orders.

The domain is run by a lean, cross-functional team end-to-end. As a Senior II Software Engineer, you'll be one

of the more senior individual technical contributors in your squad: trusted to design systems rather than just

implement tickets, to own the technical quality of your team's area, and to help set the pace on how the team

works — including how it adopts AI-native, agent-first development practices.

You'll work closely with your Senior Engineering Manager, Staff Engineers, VP of Engineering and the Director

of Architecture, translating business goals into sound technical decisions and raising the engineering bar across

the squad.

What You Will Own

Technical Ownership & Delivery

• Own and deliver projects in service of quarterly domain goals, identifying problems worth solving

before being asked, and coordinating work across people and squads where needed.

• Independently carry out research, analysis, design, development, testing, release, and ongoing

maintenance for new and existing software solutions.

• Take ownership of individual sub-workstreams and represent the technical side of assigned projects

independently.

• Balance technical excellence with business outcomes; stay cost-aware and use business and customer

reasoning to influence team priorities.

Software & Architecture Design

• Design clean, well-structured systems across service and API boundaries; simplify complex codebases

and help set technical standards for the team.

• Own the architecture for your team's area, ensuring designs align with our wider technical direction,

and document and share decisions clearly with the rest of engineering.

• Contribute to the design and programming of the databases underpinning the applications your team

supports.

• Identify, justify, and communicate architectural improvement opportunities — working with your

team and manager to get business buy-in and prioritisation.

AI-Native Engineering

• Regularly use unattended AI coding agents for end-to-end feature delivery, building and maintaining

blueprint specs that let others operate them reliably.

Contribute to — and help implement — your squad's agentic development strategy, going beyond

personal use of AI tools to improving how the team uses them.

• Apply strong context engineering and prompting practice so agent-produced code complies with

functional and non-functional requirements (harness)

Reliability, Quality & Support

• Maintain the team's list of reliability improvements (reviewed monthly); lead reviews of service

health and readiness before major releases.

• Own key monitoring dashboards and alerts for your team's services, ensuring issues are caught and

resolved before they meaningfully impact customers.

• Ensure your team follows World of Books's security standards; track compliance and raise gaps early.
• Lead the response to larger incidents in your area, and drive improvements to runbooks and

processes so issues don't recur.

• Test all code you produce; investigate and resolve root causes of issues found through testing,

running, or production use.

People, Collaboration & Team Contribution

• Mentor engineers earlier in their careers, offering honest, constructive feedback, and take an active

role in interviews — representing the team compellingly to candidates.

• Put forward well-reasoned, justified recommendations on team composition, including hiring needs,

to your manager.

• Act as a proactive, positive, and collaborative member of the squad, working effectively with internal

and external partners and stakeholders.

• Communicate with clarity and influence stakeholders across audiences; initiate difficult or crucial

conversations when needed, even when uncomfortable.

• Participate fully in team and individual meetings; proactively flag anything reducing team

effectiveness and propose solutions.

What We're Looking For

Essential

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of independently

owning significant pieces of work end-to-end.

• Deep proficiency in at least one of Java/Spring Boot, Next.js/React, or Kotlin/Swift, with the ability to

learn fast.

• Demonstrated system-level and architectural thinking — designs components and systems, not just

individual features.

• Confident, day-to-day use of AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as a

core part of how you write and ship software.

• Strong testing discipline and end-to-end ownership of code quality.
• Effective, proactive communication in English and Hungarian, able to work confidently with cross-functional and cross-border partners.
• Working knowledge of database design and programming relevant to the applications you build.
• Ethical, thorough, and dependable working practices, with full attention and care given to the team's

shared standards.

Highly Valued

• Experience with eCommerce or consumer-facing platforms (Shopify or equivalent), event-driven

architectures (Kafka/Pulsar), or native mobile delivery (iOS/Android).

• Experience mentoring engineers or actively participating in interview processes.
• Experience owning observability, service-level targets, or a reliability backlog for a service area.
• Familiarity with architecture decision records and lean, low-overhead engineering process.
• A track record of helping a team adopt AI-assisted development practices — not just using AI tools

yourself, but improving how the team uses them.

What You'll Get

A senior technical seat within one of World of Books's most commercially important engineering

domains.

• A clear path for career growth, with transparent expectations at every level.
• Real investment in AI-assisted engineering — modern tooling and support to build your skills.
• Remote-friendly working with occasional team meet-ups; HQ in Pécs, Hungary.
• Competitive salary package.
• Flexible working hours, 2 days of extra holiday, Health Fund (Egészségpénztári kártya), 15 days of sick

leave topped up to 100%.

• A mission you can be proud of: every book sold keeps something out of landfill.