Senior Product Engineer (Freelance)
About this role
3-4 days per week, hybrid work policy in central London office
We're looking for a freelance product engineer to join us between June and October 2026, working primarily on wonderbly.com with a focus on driving growth into Q4.
This is a hands-on role. The work involves close collaboration with the VP product and other teams to solve deep customer experience challenges around our Kids and Keepsake landing pages and journeys, in order to unlock growth in these key areas for the business.
You'll be working within a small, focused team — and at least some of the time, with a fair amount of autonomy. We're not looking for someone to execute a perfect brief. We're looking for someone with the judgment to help us figure out the right thing to build, and then build it well.
A few things that are important to us
The work you're doing feeds directly into beautifully made, deeply personal books that people treasure. People’s perception of quality has to be high on first contact with our website.
We're an AI-first engineering team and want someone who brings that same orientation: using AI tools thoughtfully to move faster and have greater impact by tackling harder problems.
We also believe the best collaboration happens in person. We'd love you in our Bloomsbury studio on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week. It's a lovely place to work.
The initial contract is three months, but we expect it to grow as the work and our working relationship develops . We'll agree a competitive day rate based on your experience.
This role suits someone who is
- Comfortable working across domains as it involves working closely with our creatives, product, and trading/marketing squads
- Someone that can rapidly get up to speed with our tech stack and has strong experience in other areas: backend, ecommerce, UX
- Confident and empathetic in their approach
- Obsessed with quality because we are the premium personalised book brand in the space
- Agentic in their approach to everything as we are an AI first engineering team and we are transforming our processes to match. We are still learning, hopefully from you, and want to work together to create enduring solutions
Our tech stack
- Astro as our headless e-commerce storefront app
- Next for our custom personalisation capture “canvas” app
- Typescript everywhere
- Deployed on Heroku (migrating to Render)
- Prismic CMS and custom ecommerce backend
- Good DX (could you make it better?)
Company at a glance
Wonderbly is the world's leading personalised publishing company. We make unique gift books to read over and over again and keep forever.
Our mission is to make people feel extraordinarily special, and bring them closer to the people they love, through the power of personalised stories. We've shipped over 12 million books to over 150 countries — and we're just getting started.
In 2025 Wonderbly joined Penguin Random House, the world's biggest and most iconic publishing group.
Getting personalised books to millions of customers requires a multidisciplinary team with experience across editorial design, research, production, software engineering, marketing, ecommerce, data analysis, print-on-demand manufacturing and shipping. This makes Wonderbly a collaborative and creative place to work, with opportunities for growth across a broad range of skills.
We're based mainly in London, with a bright studio for working together, and operate a hybrid model with many colleagues working remotely.
Our values
Wonderbly's values were born from the three enduring qualities at the heart of Lost My Name, our original bestselling children's book: Courage, Curiosity and Kindness.
Courage means taking calculated risks and trying things no one else would. Setting audacious goals, seeing them through, and being willing to be wrong.
Curiosity means investing in learning and never losing sight of why. It allows us to ask the obvious questions, explore our blind spots, and draw inspiration from other disciplines.
Kindness is the Wonderbly heart. It means making space for one another, inclusivity as standard, and clear, direct communication.
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