Python Software Engineer - Search

About Cookpad

Cookpad is a tech company building a community platform for people to share recipe ideas and cooking tips. Because we believe that cooking is the key to a happier and healthier life for people, communities and the planet.

The choices we make shape our world. And when we cook, the choices we make have an impact on ourselves, the people we cook for, the growers and producers we buy from and the wider environment.

Position

The existing team covers a wide variety of different skills and we’re looking to broaden this yet further. Here are a few broad areas in which our team works. Can you picture yourself having an impact in one of these areas? Do you have an eagerness to advance your knowledge in one or more of these areas? Please highlight this when applying.

• APIs and services: Building fast, flexible APIs and the data processing that underpins them. Designing APIs to be used by a variety of users – from cooks across the world, to internal users like engineers and community managers. Building libraries, services, and tooling that accelerate the pace of delivery 
• Search at scale: Deep knowledge of the Elasticsearch query DSL and performance tuning for real-time applications at global scale. Skills in data exploration using Kibana 
• Search science: The algorithms and methods that make search more relevant. Identifying opportunities to improve search quality – from relevance engineering to machine learning to natural language processing and beyond. Devising evaluation methodologies to measure search quality and developing experiments to validate them

A typical day might include any of the following:

• Implement and deploy a new experimental HTTP API endpoint to test an unproven feature concept against our existing baseline (and being prepared to fail fast, revert and rethink!)
• Implement a change in system architecture to improve an onerous or error prone area of development, subsequently helping the team make the most of the change
• Explore API performance to further improve response times while still ensuring results are hyper-relevant for every user 
• Refactor a section of code to fix the flaky test that seems to intermittently fail, especially when you want to release something new and exciting to production
• Review another team member’s PR, offering “must”, ”should”, “could”, and “would” guidance that finds the sweet spot between delivery and improvement 
• Add a step to CI to automate an element of PR review, freeing team time to spend on other development work

Your qualification

• You have substantial experience of working in a software team delivering features at pace
• You love writing software using Python. You deliver tested, reliable, and maintainable software
• You prefer working on backend engineering problems, including contributing to projects such as building web APIs, data processing pipelines, and project tooling. You leave beautiful clean code behind that other developers love to work with
• You’ll have experience of, or are excited to learn about, some of the other technologies we apply at Cookpad, such as Apache Spark (PySpark), Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, AWS, Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes (but don’t let not having any of these stop you applying if you have something else to bring!)
• You are passionate about continuous integration and delivery, and apply these principles when building software, striving to ship your work quickly and often 
• You’ll want to have a hand not only in deciding how our software is built, but in understanding who it’s being built for and why they need our help

What we offer

People join us because they share our vision to improve people’s lives. As a company Cookpad invests heavily in learning and development - we hire smart people who thrive in small, highly collaborative and energised teams, and who look at what we do and want to be part of it.

Valuing our team means we offer competitive salaries, an employee referral scheme and very generous benefits, including 7% employer pension contribution, income protection and life insurance, and an employee referral scheme. We are central to transport hubs and bike routes which helps with flexible working and all-important downtime with family and friends.

In our usual working environment breakfast is provided every day, we have a fully stocked and fully equipped team kitchen where we can cook together and there are weekly pilates/ yoga classes.

In this interim period due to the current global pandemic we are working to keep as many of our perks as possible available to our staff. This includes moving the pilates/ yoga classes online as well as company socials and attendance of meetups.