Priya, 31: the engineer whose London deposit bought a house near Sefton Park

Before her story, the honesty note this site owes you: Priya is currently a placeholder profile, written as the template for the real interviews Happydance will publish before this site goes live, because a company built on Sell The Truth does not pass off fiction as testimony. The salaries, house prices, neighbourhoods and commutes in her story are all real and checkable. She exists so the real Priya, and there are several on the team, can be interviewed this well.

She is 31, her partner works in NHS communications, and she talked to us the way she apparently does everything, fast and with receipts.

What do you actually do all day?

"I am a product engineer in the squad that owns the candidate-facing experiences, so easy-apply overlays, conversational navigation, that end of the stack. Day to day that is TypeScript and React with a decent amount of Node when the work crosses the boundary, which it constantly does, which is why I like it.

An honest Tuesday: stand-up at 9:30, then I had four hours on a genuinely fiddly accessibility problem, keyboard navigation in a multi-step apply flow, because WCAG 2.2 AA is a hard requirement here and enterprise clients audit it. Afternoon was two code reviews, a fifteen-minute argument about component naming that I won, and refinement, which I will not pretend is thrilling. What I do not have any more is what I had in London: two hours of Northern line, and four hours of meetings pretending to be collaboration. The deep work here is real. I measured it my first month because I did not believe it."

Why did you leave London, really?

"Money first, and I refuse to be embarrassed about that. We were paying £1,900 a month for a one-bed in Zone 3 and saving for a deposit that kept receding, because every year the target moved faster than we did. I sat down with a spreadsheet one Sunday, the cost of living comparison on this site is basically that spreadsheet, and worked out that our deposit fund would nearly buy a whole house outright up here. Semis around south Liverpool average about £249k. Our actual deposit was not far off half that, and with two salaries the mortgage on the rest is £600 a month less than our London rent was.

But here is the honest bit, because the money was the easy half of the argument. I was scared leaving London meant leaving ambition. That is the sentence I want other Londoners to hear, because nobody says it out loud. I thought regional tech meant slower, smaller, somehow lesser. What I found is a platform with National Grid and Canva on it, a codebase that moves faster than my London one did, and a tech scene, 4,000-plus digital companies across the city region, that I had simply never bothered to look at. The fear was snobbery wearing a career-planning costume. Eighteen months in, I can say that plainly."

When was the job hard?

"Month four. We shipped a big change to the apply flow and an enterprise client's audit found accessibility regressions, real ones, that my code contributed to. I had come from a place where accessibility was an annual checkbox, and here it is a hard requirement, and I got that wrong publicly. The review of the fix was thorough in a way that stung. Nobody was unkind, that is the point of the review culture, but nobody pretended it was fine either.

What made it formative instead of crushing: my lead paired with me for two days rebuilding not just the code but my whole mental model of accessible components. And the client got a straight account of what happened, because apparently we tell them the truth too. I am now the person in my squad other people bring accessibility questions to, which is the most satisfying arc of my career so far, and it started with my worst month."

Why do you stay?

"The house near Sefton Park is a reason, I will not pretend it is not. Owning a home at 31, with a garden, in a neighbourhood we love, changed something in both of us that renting never let settle. But you can own a house and hate your job, so, the real answer: scope and honesty. I have shipped more meaningful work in eighteen months here than in four years in London, because there are fewer people between me and the product. And the company runs on the same candour it sold me in the interview. When something is broken, we say so, to each other and weirdly often to clients. After years of corporate weather-forecasting, that is addictive."

What is your Liverpool life like?

"We are between Allerton and Mossley Hill, leafy south Liverpool, ten minutes' walk from Sefton Park. Saturday is parkrun, I have done Sefton Park parkrun more than fifty times now and my time has improved by ninety seconds since the flat London course, make of the hills what you will. Then it is the farmers' market or a slow breakfast on Lark Lane, which is the neighbourhood's worst-kept secret. Sundays we cycle Otterspool Prom or walk Calderstones Park.

The thing London friends do not believe until they visit: the evenings. Gigs, food on Bold Street, proper pubs, all fifteen minutes away, none of it requiring a night bus home. And when we miss London, it is 2h15 on a direct train, and honestly, we go about twice a year and come home glad. The Allerton and Mossley Hill page is accurate, I checked it before agreeing to this interview."

Priya's quick answers

What would you tell a Londoner considering this move?

"Do the spreadsheet before you do the soul-searching. The money is not a marginal improvement, it is a different life category, and once you see it in numbers the fear conversation gets much more honest. Then come up for a weekend, not an interview, and see if the city takes."

What do you genuinely miss about London?

"The specific friends, obviously. The gallery scale, sometimes. My old team's Friday dumplings. What I do not miss is any part of the daily texture: commute, rent, crowd, cost. I keep checking whether that will change. Eighteen months, still no."

Did your salary drop, honestly?

"Yes, and I want the number said plainly: Liverpool engineer salaries run below London gross, around the levels this site publishes. Then our fixed costs dropped by far more, and we bought a house. Net monthly position, we are massively ahead. Gross salary is vanity, disposable income is sanity, that is my whole speech."

More stories, and where this one could lead

If Priya's spreadsheet Sunday sounds overdue in your household, the current openings will tell you exactly what the Liverpool side of the equation pays. The rest of the maths lives on the cost of living comparison, deposit anecdotes included.