Who are Happydance, and why would you build your career here?

If you are considering one of our software engineer jobs in Liverpool, this page is the background check you deserve: where we came from, what we actually build, how we think, and why we are here rather than in a glass tower in Shoreditch.

Where did Happydance come from?

From years of watching great employer brand work die on terrible careers sites. The people behind Happydance spent a long time crafting employer brands for some of the world's biggest employers, and kept hitting the same wall: the strategy was strong, the stories were true, and then candidates landed on a careers site that buried all of it. So in 2022 the answer became a product. Happydance was built to be the platform those brands deserved, with hard-won knowledge of what candidates actually respond to baked into the software.

That heritage matters for engineers in a practical way. We are not a startup guessing at product-market fit; we grew out of years of client evidence about what works in talent attraction. The product decisions you will build against are grounded in that evidence, and the client relationships came with real trust already established.

Two software engineers pair programming at a monitor in a converted Baltic Triangle warehouse office in Liverpool

Who is Bryan Adams?

Bryan Adams is the founder of Happydance and the author of Sell The Truth, the book behind the Give and Get philosophy this whole site runs on. The method is simple to state and rare to practise: tell candidates the truth about a job, including the hard parts, so the right people lean in and the wrong people filter themselves out. Everyone saves time, and the people who join actually stay, because nothing about month three surprises them.

You will notice every page on this site publishes salaries, hard parts and "who this is not for" sections. That is not a campaign gimmick for this microsite; it is the operating philosophy of the company, applied to ourselves. We build honesty into careers sites for a living, so hiring engineers dishonestly would be a strange way to run the shop.

What does the product actually do, and what would you build?

The platform turns careers sites from brochures into systems that measurably attract, convince and convert candidates. Engineers here build conversational navigation, AI content generation on LLM APIs, smart SEO automation, AI discoverability and structured data, bias detection that checks job content against 80 criteria, analytics dashboards, internal mobility sites and easy-apply overlays, all on a multi-tenant architecture in TypeScript, React, Node.js and .NET on Azure. The tech stack page goes into proper depth.

And it works, measurably. Careers sites on the platform see a 25% average increase in annual traffic, up to 50% more pageviews, over 75% more sessions year on year, and conversion rate improvements of up to 25%. For an engineer, that connection between commit and outcome is one of the quietly satisfying things about working here: the features you ship show up in numbers clients pay attention to.

There is a second layer of meaning too, if you want it. Careers sites are where people make some of the biggest decisions of their lives. Making that moment clearer, fairer and more honest, at the scale of clients like General Motors and National Grid, is genuinely worthwhile work. We will not lay it on thicker than that.

Why is Happydance based in the Liverpool City Region?

Because it is home, and because it is a better bet than the clichés suggest. The company grew up here and stayed: HQ in Aughton near Ormskirk, a market town on the Merseyrail Northern Line about 35 minutes from Liverpool Central, with the team drawn from across the city region.

The region has earned the choice. More than 51,000 digital and creative professionals work here across 4,000+ digital companies, the digital economy grew 48% over the last decade, outpacing UK averages, and the infrastructure is real: a 212km full-fibre gigabit network, the UK's largest 5G mesh network in development, and investment from IBM Research, Atos and Intel. The Liverpool tech scene page carries the full evidence.

For you, the location is a large part of the offer. Liverpool's average house price is £221,000 against £351,000 across England and Wales, which changes what an engineering salary means in lived terms. Time Out ranked the city 7th best in the world in 2024, and the honest specifics of living here, from Baltic Triangle flats to Formby's beach and red squirrels, fill an entire pillar of this site starting at moving to Liverpool.

What is the culture, without the wallpaper?

Small cross-functional squads, two-week sprints, hybrid working at 2 to 3 days together per week, a code review culture with real teeth and real kindness, and quarterly hack days. The honest trade-offs: enterprise clients with exacting standards, accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA as a hard requirement, multi-tenant complexity, and a product moving fast in the AI era. The how we work page describes the machinery, and our people's stories describe how it feels from inside, told by the people themselves.

Frequently asked questions

How big is Happydance?

We are a focused product company serving enterprise clients, not a thousand-person software giant, which means engineers get real ownership early and decisions travel short distances.

Where is the Happydance office, and do I need a car?

HQ is in Aughton, near Ormskirk, in the Liverpool City Region. Ormskirk is on the Merseyrail Northern Line, about 35 minutes from Liverpool Central on one of the UK's most punctual networks, so plenty of the team commute by train.

Is Happydance financially stable?

We are backed by a real revenue base from enterprise and mid-market clients including some of the world's largest employers. Ask us anything about this in interviews; you are entitled to assess us as thoroughly as we assess you.

Why does a careers platform company run this separate jobs microsite?

Partly to hire brilliantly, and partly, candidly, because it proves our own thesis: that a deep, honest, single-purpose careers site beats a generic one. You are standing inside our best sales demo, and we would rather tell you that than let you feel it and wonder.

Now you know us, see if the work fits

Background matters, but jobs are decided on specifics. The open engineering roles each publish salary, hard parts and who they are not for, and the tech stack page shows exactly what you would be building with. Read us the way we have tried to write to you: honestly, and with your own interests front and centre.