Despite economic uncertainty, political turmoil, the yet-to-be-fully-realised legacy of Brexit and a global pandemic, the UK scale-up landscape continues to thrive with various roles at tech scale-ups remaining available.
In fact, these companies make up a significant portion of the UK economy, and in data compiled by the ScaleUp Institute, it was found that scale-ups have contributed £1.2 trillion in turnover, and employ over three million people.
Global hub
While recent layoffs at some of the biggest names in big tech have sparked cause for concern among tech workers, fintech in particular continues to buck the trend: there are currently over 2,500 fintech companies across the UK.
London has successfully established itself as a “superhub” thanks to its high concentration of financial and professional services, and has been named as the second highest-ranking fintech ecosystem globally.
That’s according to Deloitte, as part of the government’s Kalifa Review, which also identified additional “established clusters” in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds, and Birmingham, plus “emerging clusters” in Newcastle and Durham, Wales, Cambridge, Bristol, Reading and Northern Ireland, further strengthening the sector.
Start-up versus scale-up
Access to funding has also contributed to the buoyancy of the UK scale-up space: London is home to over 1,000 venture capital firms – more than any other European city – meaning start-ups hoping to achieve their second round of funding don’t have very far to go.
And while joining a start-up at the incubation stage has its benefits, joining a company when it has already established a viable business model and is now looking for specialists to help it excel, can be both professionally and personally rewarding.
So, what does that mean for those who are exploring the job market? The fields of cloud, cybersecurity, AI and machine learning and blockchain continue to remain robust and offer a wealth of career opportunities in 2023 and beyond.
If you’re hoping to make a move this year, the Growth Business job board has lots of roles at tech scale-ups like the three below.
ByteDance
Founded in 2012, ByteDance’s mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life and its suite of platforms include TikTok, Douyin, Toutiao, Helo, and Resso. In 2021 it recorded nearly £49bn in revenue and currently employs approximately 130,000 people in 15 offices globally.
Its London office is currently seeking a production system engineer to join the data systems infrastructure (DSI) team. The successful candidate will support the company’s fast growth by building and operating hyper-scale data centres. You will also manage the full life cycles of ByteDance’s server fleet, including initial deployment, OS installation, service provisioning, inventory management, troubleshooting and repairs, and eventually decommissioning and recycling. Find out more details on this exciting opportunity or explore all vacancies at ByteDance.
Monzo
British neobank Monzo wants to make money work for everyone by building a banking platform that gives customers full control over their entire financial life. Problem solving is at the heart of its business model and the company is pushing ahead with its ambitious scale-up plans. For the year ending March 2022, revenue increased 92 per cent to £154m and it also reports 5.8 million customers, an increase of around one million customers compared to the same period the year before.
It is currently hiring several tech roles including a senior analytics engineer for its business intelligence platform. Working as part of the business intelligence team, this role involves developing curated and high quality data products, defining key problem statements and ideating solutions and effectively scaling server analytics by tuning performance and queries. Applicants should have experience with scripting languages like Python, orchestration frameworks like Airflow and Luigi and have previously used dbt, dataform or similar tooling. You can apply for this role today, or discover more roles at Monzo.
Octopus Energy
From owning an electric vehicle to powering your home, Octopus Energy wants to transform the renewable energy space. In just under two years it has grown to become one of the largest e-mobility players in the UK and Europe, with over 320,000 connected electric vehicle chargers.
The company is always looking for talent, including a senior backend developer based in its London office. Working with the back-end team that provides services for its Electric Juice ecosystem in the electric vehicle and electrification space, the new hire will work within an early-stage project and have the opportunity to influence how the back-end scales to meet new challenges and create a wider ecosystem. You’ll need experience in the creation of the web service backend for a mobile or web app using Python/Django, a strong understanding of the Python ecosystem, and the ability to write robust and fault-tolerant software. See the full job description here or check out all roles at Octopus Energy.
Accelerate your career further in 2023 via the Growth Business job board.
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