Senior Backend Engineer - Search

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

How we work

As the biggest marketplace for special items, Catawiki operates in a domain which brings plenty of unusual challenges and opportunities. You will be developing, testing and scaling our microservices, mostly written in Ruby, to handle the high volume of requests served by the platform every single day. We do this by using Infrastructure as Code principles, collaborative peer-reviews, Continuous Delivery, A/B testing every assumption and using the observability and monitoring tools already in place. We make mistakes and learn valuable lessons from them. Our focus is to be able to recover and iterate quickly.

What you’ll do

Here at Catawiki, you will make an impact by improving and delivering product innovations for the Catawiki platform. Along with other members of the Development team, you will build scalable microservices while measuring and monitoring system performance. As part of the Search & Discovery team, you will work on some of the highest traffic pages. You will help refine how users search for and discover the objects they will love, and maybe find whole new ways for them to do that! In addition, you will use experimentation, backed by data analysis, to add product features and deliver the best user experience on the platform.

Your qualification

As a Senior Engineer II, which resembles the Staff Engineer level, you have a proven track record on influencing and guiding the development of the Back-End tech stack in your company. You have often operated outside of the boundaries of your team, and can give many examples on your effectiveness doing so. With Catawiki you will continue to do so. With your extensive software engineering knowledge, you like to cooperate with engineers throughout the company, regularly focusing on cross-cutting business features, or just to help out your colleagues. You also provide guidance on a platform and company wide arhcitectural level. Apart from this you have coached multiple engineers over the years, for longer periods of time, and you will apply your coaching skills in Catawiki to help your fellow engineers grow in the best possible way.

Your past experience with Elasticsearch or other similar search technologies will allow you to support bringing the search experience at Catawiki to the next level. Your track record of designing and implementing systems that leverage search engines at scale will help you push the boundaries of what is currently possible at Catawiki. You can leverage your understanding of the underlying technology to partner with UX and Product in ideating and prioritizing our roadmap.

Last but not least you have often (co-)created opportunity proposals and RFC's. You feel at home when you need to describe problems, opportunities, pros and cons of solution alternatives, and tying these to technical solution proposals, regularly comparing new techniques to proven existing techniques. You feel comfortable in explaining discussing your proposals with Product Managers, UX-designers and multiple Tech teams. As a passionate engineer, you bring these values to Catawiki:

• You are a passionate experienced engineer with a strong eye for detail 
• You strive to be a great team player and don’t shy away from new challenges 
• You are comfortable in a startup environment and are ready to jump in and help if needed 
• You keep the company's values close to your heart and enjoy being in a diverse environment

We look for engineers who are motivated to learn new things, ship new features, and pursue new and interesting challenges. Our stack is mainly focused around Ruby and some Golang, however, if you’re passionate about learning new things then prior experience with Ruby or Go is not essential. Next to this:

• You have experience in designing, implementing and deploying backend services with a focus on high availability, low latency, and consistency 
• You have proven experience of collaborating closely with other engineers to become a valued member of an autonomous, cross-functional team
• You understand the value that you can add to the business, the product and the impact of your work on customers

What we offer

This is your chance to become part of a fast but sustainable growing tech company! You'll be part of an enthusiastic, highly motivated team of 800+ international Catawikians; you'll have big responsibilities and can really create something. Additionally you can expect:

• An attractive Stock Option package
• A diverse and international team with over 50 different nationalities 
• Catawiki provides you with a membership to the O’Reilly learning platform
• Work from home office set-up to make sure you have all you need in an ergonomically-friendly manner 
• A bike scheme for employees that helps realise a tax advantage which makes a bike up to 35% cheaper than buying!
• Our entrepreneurial environment encourages everyone to take initiative and experiment with new ideas. You’ll actively contribute to the growth of the Catawiki platform
• For people living outside of NL we offer a great relocation package for you and your family
• The fun part! Our Activity Committee plans everything from ‘CataFooty’ to International Food Festivals, Friday Drinks, Board Game Nights, Pub Quizzes and Boot Camps!
• And there’s more! Paid holidays, Holiday Allowance and a fantastic pension plan paid for by Catawiki

Additional details

Where you’ll be

This role is based in Amsterdam but we can offer remote work from the following countries: France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and The U.K. We also offer an excellent relocation package for people living outside of the Netherlands.

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 new way of working

We’ve embraced an activity-based way of working, meaning our team can choose how they split their work week between home and the office, in line with our remote framework and guidelines. In locations where we have physical offices, most employees enjoy two days at the office to connect and collaborate with each other.

Our experts and sales staff in local markets work 100% remotely – in most cases from home. Some key positions are hired remotely, while we also offer relocation services for colleagues needing to be closer to the office.