Platform Engineer at Howard Financial, UK, £Contract Rate

Howard Financial is a full-service back-office solution for companies and entities with bookkeeping, payroll, and bespoke reporting needs that require accuracy, timeliness, and institutional-quality reporting without the burden of full-time staff.

Founded in 2023, our team of more than 100 professionals supports clients across a diverse range of industries. We are tech-forward and focused on working smarter to better service our clients and deliver industry-leading solutions.

The Role

We are hiring a Platform Engineer on a contract basis to join the team building Howard's internal platform. You'll work alongside operators, leadership, and other engineers to ship the back-end systems, dashboards, and automations that run our business: practice management, internal reporting, team operations, and the connective tissue between them.

We expect this role to be solutions-oriented and leverage the latest technology (Claude Code, etc.) to ship quickly.

What You'll Do

Internal Platform Development

• Build and maintain the back-end services that power Howard's internal applications
• Develop dashboards and operational tools used by leadership, controllers, and the broader team
• Ensure performance and reliability across large datasets (thousands of records, recurring jobs, scheduled syncs)
• Contribute to a centralized internal platform that consolidates workflows across teams

Internal Systems Integration

• Build middleware and API integrations between Howard's internal systems
• Replace manual workarounds and spreadsheet bridges with automated, event-driven data flows
• Maintain a clean source of truth across the systems our team uses every day

Automated Workflow Development

• Engineer event-triggered automations that move data and actions across our internal stack without human intervention
• Build the backend logic that ties operational events to downstream effects across other internal systems

Data Normalization & Schema Mapping

• Build migration and sync logic that handles inconsistent data and maps it into a standardized internal schema
• Own the data engineering layer that makes our internal platforms speak to each other cleanly

Custom Auth & Permissions

• Build authentication and authorization layers for internal tools, with granular permissioning so sensitive data is cordoned off by department, role, or user level
• Use HRIS data (e.g., Rippling) as a schema to drive internal permissions and team-level views

Required Skills

• Fluent using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, similar) as a core part of your workflow
• Strong full-stack background with emphasis on backend and infrastructure
• Deep experience with RESTful APIs and custom middleware development
• Track record handling dirty data migrations and schema normalization
• Comfortable with serverless and modern cloud architecture
• Frontend competence (React/HTML/JS/CSS) sufficient to ship full features when needed

System Ecosystem (Fluency Expected)

You should be able to read API docs and reason about the data model for the kinds of platforms we operate on:

• Practice management and workflow tools (Notion, internal task systems)
• HRIS and identity platforms (Rippling and similar)
• Database and serverless platforms (Supabase, Postgres, similar)

The Engineer Profile

• Operational empathy. You can sit with a business process and translate it directly into automation logic
• Ambiguity tolerance. Comfortable when the spec evolves based on what the business is learning
• Lean middleware mindset. You build the right-sized pipe, not the cathedral

Why Howard

• Real engineering problems with real business impact
• Direct collaboration with operators and founders, no layers
• A working environment where AI tooling is encouraged