Graduate Software Engineer, Liverpool: £26,000 to £32,000

You have probably read a dozen graduate ads by now demanding rockstars with passion and five years of experience for an entry-level job. This is not one of those, partly because our house rules ban that language, and mostly because we do not believe in it. Here is what the job actually is.

What will you actually do as a graduate software engineer?

You will join a squad as a full member with a smaller blast radius, and learn the profession by practising it with support. Concretely:

• Shipping small, real features to production within your first month, in TypeScript and React to begin with, widening into Node.js and .NET services as your footing improves.
• Working with a named mentor, a senior engineer whose job explicitly includes your progress, with regular scheduled time, not "grab me whenever" that never happens.
• Learning through code review that is thorough and kind. Your early pull requests will get lots of comments. That is the teaching, not a judgement.
• Sitting in real sprint planning, real retros and quarterly hack days from week one, because how a team decides things is half of what you are here to learn.
• Building the unglamorous foundations: writing tests, reading existing code, debugging methodically, and asking questions early instead of sinking silently.

Day one, nobody expects you to know our stack, our domain or our conventions. We expect curiosity, honesty about what you do not understand, and steady evidence that feedback lands. That is the whole bar.

What will you work on?

The same platform as everyone else, not a sandbox. Happydance powers careers sites for clients including Canva, Domino's, Uber and National Grid, with features like conversational navigation, AI content generation, bias detection against 80 criteria and analytics dashboards. Graduates start with well-scoped pieces of real squad work, so from your first month there will be code in production, used by actual job seekers, with your name in the commit history. A week in the life shows the rhythm you would be joining.

What are the honest hard parts of a graduate role here?

The gap between university and production is real. Coursework compiles and gets marked. Production code serves enterprise clients, must meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards, and misbehaves in ways no module prepared you for. The first three months are humbling for almost every graduate we could hire. Growth lives exactly there, but it does not always feel like growth on a Tuesday afternoon.

Feedback is constant. Review culture means your work is examined in the open, kindly and often. If criticism of your code lands as criticism of you, this will be tiring until you learn to separate the two. Learning that separation is, honestly, one of the most valuable things this job teaches.

The pay is a graduate wage. £26,000 to £32,000 is above the Liverpool junior average and it is still a starting salary. The honest counterweights: Liverpool rent is a fraction of London's, the progression path to mid-level pay of £40,000 to £50,000 is mapped and real, and the local maths is set out openly on our salary page.

Some weeks are mostly confusion. A multi-tenant AI-era codebase is a lot. There will be weeks where you understand less than you hoped. The engineers who thrive treat that as the terrain, not a verdict.

Who is this graduate job not for?

• Anyone hunting a "rockstar" culture of late nights and lone heroics. We think that culture burns young engineers as fuel, and we want no part of it.
• Graduates who mainly want to work solo. This job is pairing, review and squad rituals; deep collaboration is the pedagogy.
• People who need prestige-brand names on their CV more than actual responsibility. You will get real ownership early here; you will not get a FAANG logo.
• Anyone who would rather look competent than become competent. Pretending to understand is the one habit that genuinely does not survive here.

Do you need a computer science degree to apply?

No. A CS degree is one good route; a bootcamp, a self-taught portfolio or a numerate degree plus real projects are others. What we look for is evidence you can build things and reason about them, from any source. If your route was unconventional, tell us about it plainly rather than dressing it up.

How do you apply for this graduate software engineer job in Liverpool?

Through this page, with a CV and a link to something you have built: a project, a repo, a site, however small, plus a few sentences on the hardest problem inside it. The process is deliberately not a hazing: a conversation about how you think, a practical exercise scaled honestly to graduate level, and time with the squad. Every stage is explained on the interview process page so nothing ambushes you, and every applicant gets a reply, because being ignored is a rubbish start to a career.

Frequently asked questions

Your first job shapes your habits, so choose it slowly

That is not pressure, it is the opposite. Read the career progression page to see where this leads, look at the other roles to understand the team you would grow into, and apply when it feels like a considered decision rather than a scattergun one. We will treat your application with the same care.