Description
About us
Here at Gousto, we are on a mission to become the UK's favourite way to eat dinner.
Whether it is creating diversity in our recipes or building new teams, we care about our people and the opportunities they have at Gousto.
We are committed to equality of opportunity across our organisation. At all levels we promote equality, ensuring our people are consistently treated in a fair and equal manner.
If you need reasonable adjustments at any point in the application or interview process, please let us know.
In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example – she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc).
Go Gousto!
Lead Software Engineer
The code we write powers every aspect of our business from the menu recommendation engine to driving our supply chain. We are a scale-up business on a steep growth trajectory, and with that comes the need to build a platform that can scale. In parallel to this, we need to expand our team, evolving effective tools and processes that ensure we can continue to deliver quality code at pace.
Our platform is entirely cloud-based, and many of our backend services are now delivered via AWS Lambda. Our continuous delivery pipeline is fully automated and we release code to production multiple times a day. We're in the process of moving our microservices architecture to containers.
What's it really like to work here?
- We are customer-centric, data-driven and outcome-focused, using lean principles to work iteratively, experiment and learn fast.
- We work in cross-functional squads which we are slowly evolving to include business partners. This allows us to work more closely with our colleagues in food, operations and marketing, enabling greater alignment, collaboration and innovation.
- Our squads have a high level of autonomy to decide both what outcomes they should pursue and how they will achieve them.
- We believe in being agile rather than committing to a single framework. We have a set of lean and agile principles which we follow, but beyond that squads are empowered and encouraged to tailor their working processes.
- We discourage pigeon-holing which means our engineers are responsible for designing, writing, testing, deploying and maintaining their code in production. We don't have QAs, and our architect works closely with squads to consult and collaborate.
- A DevOps culture is central to our way of working and our squads are responsible for running their solutions in production.
- Pairing and TDD are practices we champion and want to keep improving.
- 10% of our time is dedicated to tech innovation and we hold regular brown bags.
- We are committed to being involved in the wider tech community, hosting meetups, speaking at events and sharing learnings via our blog .
Our Squads
Teams at Gousto are typically made up of around 3-8 Engineers, a Product Manager, Lead Engineer and an Engineering manager. We are a diverse team from different backgrounds, we tend to have a mostly flat structure within the teams as everyone brings something different and has different experiences and knowledge.
This role is highly suitable to someone who wants to work towards being an Engineering manager, it has a good mix of technical leadership as well as coaching and delivery as part of the role.
Core Responsibilities:
- Coaching and mentoring other engineers, with the responsibility of line management of 1-2 engineers.
- Designing and delivering scalable, distributed, cloud-based systems in a highly available manner.
- Ensure the engineering team is fully aware of, and aligned to, Squad OKRs and using them for decision making
- Working with async and event-driven architectures.
- Organise and lead tech design and high level scoping sessions and taking ownership of the squad's technical domain working closely with the team on best ways forward
- Working closely with your LE peers in other teams especially when working on cross squad initiatives.
Requirements
To be successful you'll need to be passionate about these things:
Great engineering – and this is so much more than writing great code. As well as an excellent knowledge of software craftsmanship, you'll have a test-first approach and know what automated testing to apply at which level of the stack. You'll have great design and architectural knowledge and plenty of experience of maintaining your code in production.
Leadership and Coaching – you are highly proactive, you take ownership of problems and propose solutions. You create forums to drive good principles and practices across all of engineering. You mentor and coach all levels of engineering using your knowledge and experience to drive improvements across the team.
Outcome-focus – you develop a deep understanding of the problem you're solving before you build it. You are product-oriented and customer-focused, balancing technical direction with business value. You know when to compromise and when not to.
Lean delivery – you deliver rapidly in small batches, reducing risk and creating a fast feedback loop. You have a continuous improvement mindset, constantly seeking to reduce waste and avoid re-work.
Growth mindset – you are curious and are always looking to learn. You encourage a culture of learning, emphasising the importance of breadth as well as the depth of knowledge. You value feedback as a learning tool, and you offer constructive feedback with empathy.
Who you are:
- Deep knowledge of a high-level programming language – but it doesn't need to be a language that we use here. Great engineers learn quickly and are keen to adopt new languages.
- Worked with CI/CD tooling and responsibly running solutions in production, working with logging, monitoring and alerting stacks.
- A good understanding of lean product discovery and delivery practices.
- You've led teams before and as a bonus had some line management, if you haven't managed people then this is a great chance to start.
- An advocate of XP practices such as TDD and pair programming and enjoy working in an agile environment to help us grow and improve.
Benefits
Click here to see our benefits
