The job and the company: your questions about being a software engineer at Happydance

One flag before we start: items marked "placeholder" are being confirmed by the team before this site goes live, and we would rather label them than bluff.

What does a software engineer at Happydance actually do?

You build the AI-powered careers website platform that enterprises use to hire, working across features real candidates touch millions of times a year. That means conversational navigation, AI content generation, smart SEO automation, structured data for AI discoverability, bias detection against 80 criteria, analytics dashboards, internal mobility sites and easy-apply overlays, shipped for clients like National Grid, Domino's, Canva, MGM Resorts, Uber and Pinterest. Day to day you are in a small cross-functional squad, writing TypeScript, React, Node.js or .NET, reviewing code properly and shipping in two-week sprints. The full picture is in our week in the life page.

What is the Happydance tech stack?

TypeScript, React, Node.js and .NET services on Azure, with Terraform for infrastructure and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. The AI features are built on LLM APIs with structured data pipelines, which means prompt engineering, evaluation and data plumbing are real parts of the engineering work, not a side quest. It is a modern, boring-in-the-good-ways stack: mainstream tools chosen so the interesting difficulty lives in the product, not the toolchain. Note this stack summary is placeholder-flagged for final confirmation before go-live; the shape is right, the details may be tuned. The deep dive is on our tech stack page.

How does hybrid working actually work?

Two to three days together per week, and we mean together, not surveilled. The team gathers at HQ in Aughton, near Ormskirk in the Liverpool City Region, for the work that is genuinely better in a room: planning, design arguments, pairing, retros and the quarterly hack days. The other days you work wherever you work best. This is placeholder-flagged for exact policy wording, but the principle is settled: presence is for collaboration, not attendance-taking. What we ask honestly in return is that you live close enough for those days to be sustainable, which the whole Liverpool section of this site exists to help with.

Where is the office, and do I have to live in Liverpool?

The office is in Aughton, near Ormskirk, on the Merseyrail Northern Line, about 35 minutes from Liverpool Central. You do not have to live in Liverpool itself, but you do need to be within realistic reach for two to three days a week, which in practice means the city, its suburbs, the Sefton coast or the West Lancashire towns. Plenty of the team commute up the line from the city; others live in Ormskirk, Formby or Crosby and have the shorter drive. Our neighbourhood guides map the options honestly, downsides included.

What are the benefits?

Placeholder: the confirmed benefits list is being finalised by Happydance before this site goes live, and we will not invent one. What we can say now: the package is built around the same Give and Get logic as everything else here, meaning we would rather offer fewer things that matter, like proper leave, pension, kit and development budget, than a long list of beanbag-grade perks. When the final list is published on this page, every item on it will be real and used. If a specific benefit is a deal-maker for you, ask in your first conversation and you will get a straight answer.

What is the salary, and is it negotiable?

Every role we advertise carries a salary range on the job page, and yes, within that range there is room to negotiate based on evidence of your level. For market context: Liverpool software engineers average around £43.5k, seniors around £53k, principals around £67.4k and staff engineers around £78.5k, which runs about 13% below the national average while local house prices run 37% below the national average. That is the honest trade and it nets out in your favour for most lives. We will not play the game of hiding numbers until offer stage. The full argument, with the London comparison, is on the salary page.

What is genuinely hard about this job?

Four things, and we list them because the right person reads this list and leans in. Enterprise clients hold us to exacting standards, so "works on my machine" is never the bar. Accessibility is a hard requirement, WCAG 2.2 AA, not a retrofit, which is slower and better than most engineers are used to. The platform is multi-tenant at scale, so complexity compounds and sloppy abstractions get punished. And the product moves fast in the AI era, so the ground shifts under you and some of what you master this year will be rebuilt next year. If you need a settled, finished system, this will frustrate you.

Who is this job not for?

It is not for coasters, lone wolves or people who want the AI hype without the AI homework. If you want to ship quietly without code review scrutiny, dislike working in a squad, or find accessibility requirements an annoyance rather than a craft, you will be unhappy here and we will notice. It is also not ideal if you need a big-city office lifestyle five days a week, because HQ is in a market-town setting, or if you cannot relocate to the North West. We would genuinely rather you self-select out now; that is the whole point of this site.

What does career progression look like?

There is a real progression path from mid-level through senior to principal and staff-level scope, and it does not require becoming a manager. Growth here comes from ownership: leading a feature area, then a squad's technical direction, then platform-level decisions. As a company launched in 2022 and growing with its client list, the honest upside is that the ladder is still being built, which means more room and less ceremony than a big tech track, and the honest downside is that some rungs get defined as you reach them. The detail is on our career progression page.

How big are the teams, and how do you actually work?

Small cross-functional squads, two-week sprints, real code review and quarterly hack days. Squads own their slice of the platform end to end, with product and design in the room rather than upstream. Code review is a culture, not a gate: expect substantive comments and expect to give them. Hack days are where several shipped features started, so they are protected, not performative. The longer version, including how we run planning and retros, is on how we work.

Will I get to work on the AI features?

Yes, realistically everyone touches them, because AI is woven through the product rather than fenced into a lab. Conversational navigation, content generation, SEO automation and discoverability features all sit on LLM APIs and structured data pipelines, and squads across the platform integrate with them. If you have deep LLM experience you will find real problems worthy of it; if you do not yet, this is a credible place to build it, with the honest caveat that we build product on top of models, we do not train foundation models.

Is Happydance a startup? How stable is it?

Happydance launched in 2022, founded by Bryan Adams, so it is a young product with deep employer-branding roots and an enterprise client list. Clients include National Grid, General Motors, Canva, MGM Resorts, Uber, Box, Pinterest, Xero, Criteo and Ingram Micro, which is unusual ballast for a company this age. The honest framing: you get startup-speed decisions and product evolution with grown-up clients and revenue, not a pre-revenue gamble, and not a sleepy corporate either.

What results does the product actually get?

Careers sites on the platform average a 25% increase in annual traffic, up to 50% more pageviews, over 75% more sessions year on year, and conversion rate improvements up to 25%. We cite these because engineers deserve to know whether the thing they would build actually works. The metrics are also your metrics: squads see the analytics their features move, which makes the feedback loop unusually direct for B2B software.

Do you hire graduates and career changers?

Yes to both, with honest caveats. We run graduate and junior hiring when squads have genuine capacity to support it, because juniors deserve mentoring, not a desk and good luck; check the jobs page for what is currently open. Career changers with real software skills from adjacent routes, testing, data, self-taught portfolios, are welcome to apply and will be assessed on ability, not CV shape. Liverpool junior salaries average around £25.6k for context, and our ranges are stated per role.

Ready to check the current openings?

If these answers sound like a place you would do your best work, the logical next click is the current software engineer vacancies, and the stage-by-stage honesty continues in our interview process FAQ.