One role. One city. The whole truth.

Software engineer jobs in Liverpool, told honestly

Happydance is hiring software engineers in Liverpool, from graduate roles at around £26,000 to senior roles at up to £65,000, all hybrid, all building one AI-powered careers website platform used by companies like National Grid, Canva and Uber. This entire site exists to give you the whole picture, the good and the genuinely hard, so you can decide whether the job and the city are right for you.

See open roles What the money buys

Salary bands on every role
Hybrid, 2–3 days together
We reply to every applicant
The hard parts, in writing

Software engineers pairing at a screen in a converted warehouse office in Liverpool's Baltic Triangle

That is a strange way to open a careers site, we know. Most of them lead with a stock photo and a sentence about passion. We build careers sites for a living, and our founder wrote a book about why honesty converts better than hype, so we are going to practise what we preach. Here is everything.

What software engineer jobs are open in Liverpool right now?

We currently have five open roles, and every one of them publishes its salary band on the page:

Senior Software Engineer, £53,000 to £65,000
Software Engineer, £40,000 to £50,000
Frontend Engineer, £40,000 to £55,000
Platform Engineer, £45,000 to £60,000
Graduate Software Engineer, £26,000 to £32,000

Each job page tells you what you would actually build, what is hard about the role, and who it is not for. Start at the open software engineer vacancies in Liverpool hub if you want them all in one place.

Liverpool waterfront at dusk with the Royal Liver Building lit up over the River Mersey

Who is Happydance, and why should you care?

Happydance is the AI-powered careers website platform founded by Bryan Adams, the author of Sell The Truth. We launched in 2022 and we are headquartered in Aughton, near Ormskirk, in the Liverpool City Region. Our clients include National Grid, Domino's, General Motors, Canva, MGM Resorts, Uber, Box, Pinterest, Xero, Criteo and Ingram Micro.

The product works. Careers sites on our platform see a 25% average increase in annual traffic, up to 50% more pageviews, over 75% more sessions year on year, and conversion improvements of up to 25%. Engineers here build the features behind those numbers: conversational navigation, AI content generation, smart SEO automation, bias detection across 80 criteria, analytics dashboards and internal mobility sites. You can read about the tech stack in detail, but the short version is TypeScript, React, Node.js and .NET on Azure, with AI features built on LLM APIs.

There is more on our history and our people on the about Happydance page.

Why work as a software engineer in Liverpool rather than London or Manchester?

Because the money maths genuinely works in your favour. The average software engineer salary in Liverpool is £43,497, about 13% below the national average, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the average house price in Liverpool is £221,000 against £351,000 across England and Wales, roughly 37% cheaper. A £55,000 salary here buys a life that £75,000 struggles to buy in London: a semi in leafy Allerton or Mossley Hill for around £249,000, a short Merseyrail hop to work, and weekends that do not require a spreadsheet. We have done the full comparison on the software engineer salary in Liverpool page and the cost of living in Liverpool vs London page, with sources.

The tech scene holds its own too. The Liverpool City Region has more than 51,000 digital and creative professionals, over 4,000 digital companies, and a digital economy that grew 48% over the last decade, outpacing UK averages. The Baltic Triangle is the epicentre, all converted warehouses and indie venues, and the city runs on a 212km full-fibre gigabit network with the UK's largest 5G mesh network in development. IBM Research, Atos and Intel all invest here. This is not a city waiting for a tech scene to arrive.

And then there is the living. Two Premier League clubs, two cathedrals, the Bold Street food scene, Sefton Park parkrun on a Saturday morning, beach walks past the iron men at Crosby, and direct trains to London in about 2 hours 15 minutes. Time Out ranked Liverpool 7th in its Best Cities in the World list in 2024. If you are weighing up a move, our guide to moving to Liverpool for work covers neighbourhoods, schools and commutes properly.

What is it actually like to work at Happydance?

Hybrid, for a start: 2 to 3 days together per week, the rest wherever you work best. Small cross-functional squads, two-week sprints, a real code review culture where feedback is expected in both directions, and quarterly hack days. The how we work page goes deep on all of it, and our people's stories show you what different routes into the team look like.

Now the honest part, because every page on this site has one. The work is demanding in specific ways. Our clients are enterprises with exacting standards, so "nearly right" does not ship. Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA is a hard requirement on everything, not a nice-to-have. The platform is multi-tenant at serious scale, which means your code runs in contexts you did not design for. And the product moves fast in the AI era, so the ground shifts under you and you have to enjoy that rather than endure it. If you want a settled codebase and a quiet life, we are the wrong choice, and we would rather you knew that now.

Why does this site exist at all?

Fair question. Bryan's method, the one in his book Sell The Truth, is called Give and Get: tell candidates the truth, including the hard parts, so the right people lean in and the wrong people filter themselves out. A careers site that only sells sunshine attracts everyone and suits no one. This site is our own medicine, one role, one city, everything a candidate could want to know, with the trade-offs left in.

Frequently asked questions

Does Happydance really publish salaries on every job?

Yes. Every open role on this site states its band openly, from £26,000 for graduates to £65,000 for seniors. We think asking you to interview before telling you the pay is a waste of your time and a poor start to an honest relationship.

Do I have to live in Liverpool to apply?

You need to be able to work with the team in person 2 to 3 days a week, so you need to be in or near the Liverpool City Region, or willing to relocate. Plenty of the team commute by Merseyrail from places like Crosby, Formby and Ormskirk.

Is Happydance a startup or an established company?

Somewhere useful in between. We launched in 2022 with deep roots in employer branding, and we serve enterprise clients like General Motors and National Grid. You get product-company pace with grown-up clients and revenue.

What if none of the current roles fits me?

Read the role pillar anyway and see whether the work appeals. Roles change as the team grows, and an application that arrives with genuine understanding of what we do always gets read properly.

Have a proper look before you decide anything

You do not need to be sure yet. Browse the open software engineer jobs in Liverpool, read the hard parts as carefully as the good parts, and see how the salary maths works for your situation. If it still looks right after all that, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Engineers here build the careers sites behind teams like

National GridDomino’sGeneral MotorsCanvaUberMGM ResortsPinterestBoxXero

The product engineers here build

Careers sites on the Happydance platform, in real client numbers.

25%

average increase in annual careers-site traffic

Happydance platform data

75%+

increase in sessions year on year

Happydance platform data

up to 25%

improvement in application conversion

Happydance platform data

2022

launched, founded by Bryan Adams

Company history

What engineers here actually say

Illustrative stories, written as templates for the real interviews we will publish before launch.

“I swapped a ninety-minute Manchester commute for a ten-minute walk to Crosby beach. The work got harder and my life got easier. That trade still surprises me.”