Principal Developer (Ruby)

About Bloom & Wild

We believe that you should be able to be there from anywhere with flowers for those you love. Easily order our British designs to send in seconds to be delivered next day through the letterbox.

It's flowers, delivered with love.

Our team of in-house floral designers create bouquets weekly, changing with styles and seasons to ensure that only the best flowers are sent out.

Our range is centred around innovative designs and products. From letterbox flowers to hand-tied bouquets, roses to mini pineapples, we go beyond our customers' wildest floral imaginations. We’re always sourcing creative blooms to delight our customers.

Our designs are inspired by popular culture, fashion and interiors. Each is crafted with the idea of an English country garden in mind - beautiful with a touch of wild and whimsy.

We source our flowers seasonally, responsibly and carefully. Each bloom we work with is quality tested for longevity and beauty, we don't settle for second best.

Position

We're looking for a Principal Developer to lead our technology strategy, mentor our team of developers and ensure that we build a best-in-class e-commerce platform and customer experience. You’ll get the opportunity to work on the industry leading website and iOS / Android apps, powered by a stack which includes Angular and Ruby on Rails.

There’s stacks of room to make your mark by applying your initiative, expertise and experience to help realise our roadmap. You’ll be joining a young, close-knit team and get the chance to help shape how we work, and inspire others, while using the latest tools and technologies. This means exploring things like personalisation, voice-activation, AI and any other tools that help us create the best possible customer experience.

Your key responsibilities will include:

• Being a subject matter expert and a hands-on expert in the full technology stack, development tooling and infrastructure, who earns respect as the technical authority figure. We are scaling rapidly so if you have experience scaling a technology stack then that would be a bonus
• Ensuring that, as a tech team, we focus on pragmatically achieving the business goals using the best technical solution. Where compromises need to be made, you will work with the relevant team to ensure a plan is in place for dealing with those compromises and are able to clearly communicate the implications to developers and business stakeholders alike
• Training and mentoring software developers
• Setting and realising architecture direction, and providing technical leadership across the tech team (frontend web, native apps and backend)
• Ensuring that the tech team understand what good and appropriate engineering practices are, and that they are bought into following them
• Writing, reviewing and supporting code across all aspects of our solutions - being hands-on is a key part of this role
• Working with the team to ensure that quality is built in from the start Evangelising Bloom and Wild in the wider technology community and encouraging your colleagues in the tech team to do the same
• Working with others to set, communicate and steer the Bloom & Wild technology strategy
• Help the wider business to understand our technology stack, strategy and constraints You’ll have experience of working as a full stack developer, ideally on a customer facing product (e/m-commerce experience is a bonus) for a growing startup, and as part of one or more multidisciplinary teams

Your qualification

You are a technical leader, with an in-depth knowledge of current and emerging web and ecommerce technologies. You have proven ability to both inspire and coach others, to communicate best practice to colleagues and lead by example. Working in partnership with the VP Engineering and Product Lead, you will help to define the optimum technical approach for projects and promote code quality and craft, while leading by example.

Being passionate about the product you’re building will be as important to you as the quality of the code you write, as will tracking the impact of the things you ship and iterating to continually improve the end-user’s experience. You’ll be eager to learn, fast-moving and pragmatic, favouring working and usable MVPs, and using real customer feedback to continuously iterate and improve our tech. You’ll have experience working with developers of all skill levels, using code reviews, pair programming and other techniques to improve the team as a whole. You’ll consider “how can I help the team deliver” above “how can I deliver work myself”.

Additional details

Communication and all issues related to the position are curated by the recruitment partner of Bloom & Wild.