Full-Stack Developer

About SwapTix

The secondary ticket market has become complicated and, for many people, unfair. Customers face hidden fees, confusing policies and uncertainty when they need to change plans or resell tickets.

SwapTix is building a fair, transparent and safe platform for secondary ticket resale. Our aim is to create a clear, trustworthy experience when real money, access and time-sensitive events are involved.

We are currently pre-launch, with our legal, financial and technical foundations already in place. We are now hiring our first engineering hire on a full-time basis to work directly with the founders and build the first working version of the product.

SwapTix is currently part of City, University of London’s CityVentures incubator and is based at Venture Space.

The role

This is an early, high-ownership role. You’ll be a versatile, hands-on builder who can cover a wide range of work across the stack, especially building clean, trustworthy user-facing interfaces as well as the systems behind them. You’ll work directly with the founders to turn our product specification and technical flows into a working MVP that feels simple, robust and trustworthy. You’ll help define what “good” looks like technically, make pragmatic trade-offs, and ship.

In this role you will:

• Own the MVP build end-to-end across front-end, back-end, database and deployment.
• Build core user flows for a transactional marketplace, including all relevant states and edge cases (errors, cancellations, refunds/disputes, timeouts, failed payments and support triggers).
• Write clean, maintainable code and establish lightweight testing and review habits so the MVP stays reliable as we iterate.
• Implement authentication, user permissions, and basic administration tooling.
• Build and document APIs and data models that can scale as the product expands.
• Integrate payment and transactional components (e.g., Stripe) with clean handling of failure states and user communications.
• Set up and maintain the engineering foundations: environments, deployment, CI/CD, logging, and basic monitoring.
• Work in a tight loop with the founders on prioritisation, trade-offs, and delivery milestones.
• Contribute to product and UX decisions where helpful, especially around clarity and trust in high-risk user journeys.

What you’ll work on in the first 6–12 months

Examples of concrete work you can expect:

• Building the first production-ready web MVP, with a clean architecture and clear path to iteration.
• Translating our existing flows and requirements into reliable, well-structured front-end screens and back-end services.
• Implementing the most important transactional journeys: listing, buying/reselling, payments, verification/validation checks, and post-transaction states.
• Establishing the first version of our technical stack and patterns (repo structure, component patterns, API conventions, database migrations, testing approach).
• Setting up secure, disciplined handling of data and access controls, with a focus on trust and reducing risk.
• Working with the founders to ship in short cycles (weekly demos, measurable milestones), improving speed and quality over time.

About you: Essential

To be effective in this role, you are likely to bring most of the following:

Experience & craft

• 5+ years’ experience as a Full-Stack Engineer (or equivalent) building customer-facing web products.
• Strong front-end skills with modern JavaScript and a major framework (React; Next.js strongly preferred).
• Strong back-end skills (Node.js / TypeScript preferred; Python acceptable if you’re strong and can ship quickly).
• Strong database fundamentals (Postgres preferred) and comfort designing clean schemas and queries.
• Comfort building end-to-end flows, not just isolated components.

Breadth & ownership (essential)

• Comfortable wearing multiple hats in an early-stage environment, building UI, backend services, data models, and deployment foundations.
• Strong frontend capability: you can implement product-quality UI (not just rough prototypes) with good judgement around usability and trust.
• You are proactive and self-directed: you don’t wait for perfect specs; you clarify assumptions, document decisions, and move.
• You don’t need to be a visual designer, but you should be comfortable building and iterating the UI directly, using a clean component approach and strong product judgement.

Domain relevance

• Experience buildin…