Full Stack Developer

About Catawiki

Catawiki was founded in 2008. It was originally designed as a website where collectors could manage and keep track of their collections online. Visitors can still add new items to the existing catalogue of collectibles. Unsurprisingly, the name Catawiki is a combination of the words ‘catalogue’ and ‘wiki’. In 2011, Catawiki began hosting weekly auctions in various categories, including art, antiques, classic cars, watches, jewellery, fashion, books, and stamps.

Position

Our Backend Engineering Story

Our development team is responsible for stability, reliability, and versatility of Catawiki’s platform. We are building new and exciting product features to craft an engaging platform, where our users can offer and discover special objects. At the same time, we are moving the platform towards a microservices architecture by gradually dismantling a Ruby on Rails monolith.

So what's the job

Catawiki’s promise to users is that we’ll help them find the objects they love, and then we’ll take care of the rest. That means that our auctions are 100% curated by experts, we speak the same language as our users, we make shipping smooth and easy, and most importantly, the payment is always safe with us!
As a Lead Developer, you’ll report to the Engineering Manager of one of our verticals. Your role will not include people management responsibilities, but you will be shaping how the team is optimising our platform and developing new features. Your work will have a huge impact in delivering our promise of being a robust, reliable, secure and delightful platform.  The 3 most important aspects of your job will be:

Team 

• Ensuring a healthy team environment where members feel safe, trusted, respected, happy
• Supporting diversity of thoughts, ensure everyone’s voice is heard inside the team and people feel they have a stake in team-level decisions
• Empowering team members to take ownership / drive some of the team’s ceremonies (e.g. standups, demo sessions, retros, backlog groomings, sprint plannings)

Delivery

• Owning short-term (~1-2 months ahead) roadmap of the team in partnership with a Product Manager, driving clarity, proactively communicating the updates to the team and making sure they are aligned on goals
• Proactively flag issues / impediments that could affect delivery of the team’s work to the team’s stakeholders and propose mitigation ideas
• Oversee the delivery of the team’s work

Technical excellence 

• Facilitating adoption of engineering best practices in the team and keeping the bar at the right level
• Keeping the team accountable for building solutions aligned with the company-wide technical directions 
• Facilitating & ensuring that production incidents are analysed and right actions are followed up by the team

How we roll - Our stack

As the biggest marketplace for special items, Catawiki operates in a market, which brings a lot of unusual challenges and opportunities. You will be developing, testing and scaling our microservices, written in Ruby and some of them in Go, to handle the high volume served by the platform every single day. We do this by using Infrastructure as Code principles, collaborative peer-reviews, delivering code to production multiple times a day, A/B testing various assumptions, making mistakes, learning from them, and iterating quickly.

Your qualification

Catawiki is looking for people that like to make a big impact. We love people who want to make a contribution to further building out our engineering culture and who want to have some fun along the way. Next to this you:

• Have proven experience as a team leader
• Are versed in tackling complex projects, breaking it down into estimable chunks, identifying the right technical order for a project, dependencies, risks, proposing mitigations
• Have experience in designing, developing and deploying backend services with a focus on high availability, low latency, and scalability
• Understand that the value you can add to the business, the product is done via the rest of the team, not necessarily only by you
• Have a solid understanding of software engineering best practices

What we offer

This is your chance to join our mission to fulfil people’s passions, as part of a young and dynamic organisation. You'll be part of an enthusiastic, highly-motivated team of 800+ Catawikians. Additionally, you can expect:

• A challenging role in a diverse, international and fast-growing organisation with over 50 nationalities
• Regular fun activities both on and offline e.g summer parties, boat rides and regular team events
• Great secondary benefits including a holiday allowance and a fantastic pension plan paid for by Catawiki
• Hybrid ways of working between home and office. We offer remote and activity-based working, suited to the team and individual responsibilities
• We care about our teams’ wellbeing and offer a holistic wellbeing programme including our Employee Assistance Programme offering clinical services, single-session therapy, wellness support and more
• Tailored learning and development opportunities to support your personal and professional growth;

We want to help you celebrate special occasions in life by:

• Providing employees with a 100 EURO Catavoucher upon joining and 50 EURO birthday Catavouchers;
• Extra days of annual leave for work anniversaries at 3, 5, 8 and 10 years;
• Additional leave allowances for important life events such as moving, engagement & marriage;
• Each year Catawikians get an additional day’s leave to Pursue their Passion!

Please note that our benefits offering changes depending on which country you are employed in. For our country-specific offering please ask your recruiter. 

Additional details

Our commitment to you

Catawiki’s eclectic team represents an international and intergenerational mix of people from different professional and cultural backgrounds. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly work environment, committed to making every Catawikian feel welcomed and empowered. Whatever your story, we encourage you to bring your unique perspective to the table.

Catawiki stands with Ukraine and encourages people displaced by the current conflict to apply. In addition to the several initiatives we’ve launched, we’re open to ideas on ways we can continue to support the humanitarian effort.

Our offices and way of working

We have sensational offices in Amsterdam, Groningen, Paris and our newest office in Lisbon. Most of our employees are within commutable distance of one of our office locations and enjoy a hybrid work model. This means we expect you to be in the office 2 out of 5 days, roughly 40% of your working time, to collaborate and connect with each other. The exception is of course, if the job description specifically states that the role is 100% remote, as some experts and sales positions are.