Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

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

Catawiki’s promise to our users is: find the objects you love, and 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 enable sellers of all sizes (both individuals and companies) to scale their business globally.

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. In addition, you will use experimentation, backed by data analysis, to add product features and deliver the best user experience on the platform.

About the team

The Supply vertical in Catawiki is the linchpin of the marketplace. Catawiki is known for the exceptional and rare objects sold to passionate buyers worldwide. To do this, we have two areas: Seller Experience and Curation.

The Seller Experience teams help sellers sell their special items and be successful on Catawiki. This involves driving growth, optimising their experience, and assisting large professional sellers to gain efficiency. The Curation teams help our Experts curate and merchandise lots & auctions, and make sure that experts have necessary tools to be effective.

The team consists of back-end, front-end, mobile, and QA engineers, a dedicated product manager, team manager and UX designer. We take end-to-end ownership of problems and work closely with other teams and functions to gather requirements and ensure the delivery of compliant solutions.

A little about you

The Supply team is looking for people with a strong product mindset who like solving user problems by leveraging technology, and who will take the lead in creating solutions for our stakeholders. Besides this, you will help grow the team in every aspect of engineering, and you have a strong eye for trying new technological solutions, and bringing these to the organization.

If scale and complexity excite you, this is the right place! We are looking for open people who want to grow and strive to continuously improve the systems, processes, and people around them.

So, apply if you...

• Have experience designing, developing, and deploying back-end services focusing on high availability, low latency, and scalability
• Have proven experience collaborating closely with other engineers to become a valued member of an autonomous, cross-functional team
• Have proven experience in (technically) leading engineering teams to solve complex business problems, deeply connecting with your stakeholders
• Have multiple times prototyped new technical solutions and changed them into solution patterns that are used in and beyond your team
• Understand the value you can add to the business and the impact the product and your work can have on users
• Have a great understanding of engineering best practices (we primarily use Ruby on the Back-End, but language isn’t as important to us as a strong engineering mindset)
• Have a proven track record in coaching and mentoring your colleagues

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.

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 750+ 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, a discount on health insurance and a fantastic pension plan paid for by Catawiki.

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 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.