Software Engineer - Junior to Senior

ABOUT SKIFTR

The job market is changing faster than people can navigate it. AI, automation and economic shifts are reshaping which skills matter, which roles exist, and where people can go next. But most people still navigate by job titles and guesswork. We're building something to fix that. Skiftr is career intelligence for the individual. We continuously map the Nordic labor market to understand what companies are hiring for, which skills are in demand, what roles pay, and how someone's existing experience can translate into opportunities they may never have considered. Underneath the product is infrastructure we've built largely from scratch: systems that continuously collect and understand labor-market data, combined with AI that turns that data into useful recommendations for real people. We're backed by EIFO and part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Our team includes people with backgrounds from McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Novo Nordisk, BMW and Heidrick & Struggles. The product is live. Demand is growing. We're expanding the engineering team because the problem is big, the opportunity is real, and there is a lot more we want to build. We are currently 12 full time team members, across engineering, design and sales.

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We're hiring several software engineers across seniority levels. You might be early in your career and looking for a place where you'll learn unusually fast, with real responsibility, good feedback, and engineers who will challenge your thinking. You might be experienced and want more ownership than you'd get in a larger company: larger parts of the system, technical decisions that matter, and the chance to help others become better. Or you might be senior and want to shape architecture, product and engineering culture while still writing code every day. We care less about your title or years of experience than how you think, how you build, and how much responsibility you want to take. At Skiftr, everyone ships. If you build something, we expect you to understand it, improve it, and stay close to what happens after it reaches users.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

Depending on your strengths and interests, you might work on:

• The product people use to understand where their career could go next
• Systems that continuously map and understand the Nordic job market
• Matching people to roles they would never have thought to search for
• Skills, salary and career-path intelligence
• LLM-powered matching, scoring and generation
• Data pipelines processing a constantly changing labour market
• Internal tooling that lets a small engineering team move unusually fast
• The infrastructure required to make all of this reliable as we scale

This isn't a thin interface on top of an LLM API. A large part of the engineering challenge is taking an enormous, messy and constantly changing real-world dataset and turning it into something trustworthy enough for people to make important career decisions from. If you want to solve real problems with real data, rather than only wiring APIs together, you'll find this interesting.

OUR STACK

• Frontend: Next.js
• Backend: Python / Django
• Cloud: Google Cloud Platform, European regions
• Payments: Stripe
• Data & AI: continuously updated labour-market pipelines, LLM-powered matching, scoring and generation

You don't need to be an expert in every part. If you're very good in one area and capable of becoming good in the others, we'd still like to hear from you.

HOW WE BUILD

We're a small team, which means engineers have a lot of autonomy. Problems don't always arrive as perfectly specified tickets. We expect engineers to understand what they're building and why, work out a sensible path forward, ship it, see what happens, and take responsibility for the outcome. We care about engineering quality, but we're pragmatic. Sometimes the right decision is to build something quickly and learn. Sometimes it's to stop and solve the underlying technical problem properly. Good engineering here means being able to tell the difference and being thoughtful about the trade-offs. We're highly AI-native. We use AI heavily in development and invest in the best tools we can find. We think excellent engineers using excellent AI tools can build dramatically more than was possible a few years ago. At the same time, using AI doesn't remove responsibility for the code. If you ship it, you should understand it and be comfortable standing behind it. We're anti-slop. Speed matters, but so do code quality, maintainability and understanding.

IF YOU'RE EARLY IN YOUR CAREER

We don't expect a ten-year CV. We expect curiosity, strong fundamentals, and evidence that you like building things. You should want feedback, ask questions when you don't know something, and be comfortable being given real responsibility earlier than you might be elsewhere. You'll work alongside experienced engineers and be expected to learn quickly. When you raise a PR, expect to walk more experienced engineers through the code, the decisions you made, the alternatives you considered and the problems you ran into. We use AI heavily, but we want it to make you a better engineer, not replace your understanding of what you've built.

IF YOU'RE EXPERIENCED

You'll take ownership of larger parts of the product and system, make technical decisions, identify problems before someone assigns them, and help other engineers become better. You should be comfortable moving between product thinking, architecture and implementation. Your title doesn't matter much to us. Your contribution does.

SKIFTR IS A START-UP

We have been able to get together the best people we know, in an attempt to build something that no one has built before, or been able to. We do so, to challenge companies that make significant money, to keep the job market dark, and we do that with less resources and people. The resources we do have, is from the backing of EIFO, Google and some of the best private investors around, that has built companies before, and put their trust in us succeeding. We do not demand certain working hours, or measure these, but you will need to be comfortable to work around people who work significant hours in the pursuit to build what you, and they, own together.

ABOUT YOU

You'll probably enjoy working here if:

• You are interested in a start-up journey. Fast pace, meaningful work and real ownership / equity in the outcome of the business.
• You care about the user, not just the code
• You take ownership when something you built doesn't work as intended
• You want to understand systems, not just generate code
• You use AI aggressively but don't outsource your thinking to it
• You can make decisions without perfect information
• You care about quality without using perfection as a reason not to ship
• You like working with people who will challenge your thinking
• You're happy to change your mind when someone has a better argument
• You want meaningful responsibility
• You enjoy the ambiguity and pace of an early-stage company without romanticizing chaos

You don't need to speak Danish. You do need to be able to work physically with us in Gentofte, Denmark. We're a global team, but we believe engineering at this stage of Skiftr is best done with significant time together in the same room.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Real ownership from the beginning, at a level that matches your experience
• Equity and the opportunity to participate in what we build
• A strong engineering team with people to learn from and challenge you
• Serious investment in AI tooling
• Very little bureaucracy. Powerpoint is not allowed, neither is doors to meeting rooms.
• Direct influence over product and technical decisions
• Backing from EIFO and participation in the Google for Startups Cloud Program
• An early-stage company where individual engineers can still materially change the outcome
• Breakfast and lunch from Madro, plus dinner when the team is around late
• Free coffee, soft drinks and the other office essentials

Most importantly: a hard technical problem attached to something that matters. AI will change an enormous number of careers over the coming decade. We want to build the infrastructure that helps people understand where to go next.

APPLYING

We don't ask for a traditional cover letter. Along with your LinkedIn profile, we'll ask you to answer a few short questions here on The Hub. There aren't necessarily perfect answers. We're interested in how you think.

PROCESS

You'll meet people from the Skiftr team for a conversation about you, us and whether there's a genuine match. There will also be a technical conversation appropriate to your experience level. We're not going to evaluate a junior engineer as if they're a staff engineer, and we're not going to evaluate a senior engineer on whether they can solve a puzzle under pressure. We want to understand how you think, how you approach problems, and what it would be like to build something together. Skiftr is anti-ghosting. Everyone who applies gets a response. We can't promise detailed individual feedback to every applicant, but we won't leave you wondering whether anyone read your application. If this sounds like the kind of environment where you'd do your best work, we'd like to hear from you.