Senior Product Engineer, Johannesburg

MSA Outsourcing Solutions - UK is seeking an experienced engineer who will join one of our UK clients — someone who can sit with a business stakeholder, understand a vague problem, ask the right questions, and translate it into a working solution. You'll be the bridge between business and engineering: refining requirements, shaping scope, making sensible technical trade-offs, and shipping the result. You should be equally comfortable in a stakeholder conversation and a code review.

Requirements

• Work directly with business stakeholders to understand their needs and translate them into clear specs and shipped features
• Own features end-to-end — from ambiguous problem statement, through scoping, to production
• Build and maintain a React frontend and Supabase backend
• Push back constructively when requirements don't make sense, and propose better alternatives
• Make sensible architecture and technical decisions, with a bias toward simplicity and shipping
• Mentor and review work from other engineers when needed
• Help us evolve the product, not just maintain it
• 5+ years of full-stack engineering experience, including a meaningful stretch as a founding engineer, tech lead, or one of the first hires at a small startup
• Strong React with TypeScript and modern patterns
• Demonstrable experience with Supabase, or Postgres plus equivalent BaaS (Firebase, Hasura) that you'd transfer quickly
• A portfolio of products you've shipped — ideally with stories about features where you defined the problem yourself, not just the solution
• Excellent written and spoken English — you'll be in stakeholder conversations regularly
• Comfortable working with non-technical people: translating jargon, asking clarifying questions, sketching solutions on whiteboards (or Miro)
• Self-directed and able to operate with significant autonomy

Strongly Preferred:

• Experience running customer interviews, product discovery sessions, or stakeholder workshops
• Prior experience as a solo or near-solo engineer on a real product with users
• A track record of saying "we shouldn't build that" with a sound reason — and being right
• Public writing, talks, or open-source contributions — anything showing thought leadership
• Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase Edge Functions
• Background in [INSERT YOUR DOMAIN — e.g., logistics, fintech, B2B SaaS]
• Formal product management or BA experience earlier in career