Backend Developer

About Carwow

carwow is the most convenient, stress-free way to find and buy a new car, at a price you can be confident in.

Buying a new car is one of the most exciting purchases most people make, but it's often let down by the experience. Trudging round the dealers, haggling over price, always wondering if you're getting a good deal.

But with carwow there's none of that.

• Find and buy your new car in just a few clicks.
• Compare offers based on price, location and dealer rating.
• Get the dealer's best price up front, no need to haggle.
• Contact your preferred dealer on your terms - no hassle to buy.
• Buy direct from the dealer at a price you can be confident in.

carwow. It's car buying with you in the driving seat.

Position

• We work quickly and you’ll be able to have a direct impact on the product — pushing code to production within your first day
• You will be working with a company who are passionate about quality — TDD means a lot to us. Whilst delivery is important, we don’t sacrifice on quality
• You will work within a truly collaborative, pragmatic, team where you can learn from some highly-experienced developers from many different professional backgrounds
• We’ve got a team culture of open-mindedness that allows you to have your opinions and insights be heard,considered and tried
• We’re a growing team so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to grow your own skills and work your way towards whatever career ambitions you may have
• We promote continuous learning and don’t pigeonhole our developers to just knowing Ruby, you will be able to attend conferences for different types of technology such as Elm Europe, ElixirLDN, dotCSS / JS, Full Stack Fest and Strangeloop
• We care about being a happy and balanced team
• You will have the opportunity to gain more experience around mentoring and coaching junior developers should you wish to
• You will be working for a technology driven company, where the main stakeholders have a very good understanding of the product development process and nuances of software development. One of our co-founders is the CTO who is very passionate about software engineering and does a great job of educating the company about how exactly building software with agility works
• You will be exposed to the entire product development process, allowing you to develop skills outside of software development
• We have challenging scalability and are growing everyday. Currently there are around 3 million visitors a month on average to the website - having grown from 2 million in the last 6 months!
• There’s lots to do; we are building tonnes of new features all the time and still defining what carwow is as a product
• Every Friday, the engineering team is given the freedom to take a break from the backlog and work on something of interest that contributes to the technical maturity and stability of our codebase - Backlog free Fridays
• You can get involved with a number of conferences that we sponsor/ run/ host such as Brighton Ruby Conference, Ruby Hacknight, Codebar and London Elixir Dojo

Your qualification

• You care about software excellence
• You know and want to learn more about software best practices such as refactoring, clean code, domain driven design, etc
• You have professional experience with a dynamic web-based programming language (e.g. Ruby, Python, or PHP)
• You understand why testing software is useful, and try to write well tested code as much as possible
• You can demonstrate a good understanding of web technologies
• You are pragmatic in your approach to writing software (e.g. you take context into consideration, and don’t follow rules blindly)
• You enjoy working with others
• You want to work in highly collaborative and cross-functional teams
• We believe diversity of experience (whether that be personal or professional), contributes to a broader perspective and will lead to a better company with highly innovative products and solutions. We’re working hard to increase the diversity of our team and be more inclusive, so if you’re not sure you fit the criteria, why not get in touch? We value confidence whilst being humble, so are keen to meet those with talent who are the right fit

What we offer

• A brand new laptop — developers usually use Macbook Pros or Dell XPS 13s with their favourite flavour of Linux (feel free to ask for what allows you to do your job best)
• A budget towards peripherals and equipment (most of our developers end up getting mechanical keyboards with theirs)
• Want training? We’ve got weekly German language classes, presentation skills training, management training, yoga classes - we’re also teaching the rest of the company how to code!
• Flexible working offered
• Full-time and part-time positions available
• Competitive salary and you'll receive equity in the business
• 25 days holiday, a training budget and work from home 1 day a week
• A chance to work in a truly data-driven environment. We A/B test extensively and data is core to our decision making process
• Get to work with a highly experienced team on a high traffic site
• Continuous delivery - every push to master goes straight to production (assuming the tests have passed!)
• Regular team lunches, free fruit and fancy coffee on tap (and tea!)
• Annual company ski trip - this year we went to Austria!
• A sociable team with monthly office-wide events
• Friday wine/beers
• Netball, football, tennis and dodgeball teams

Additional details

Our setup?

• Our product teams are cross functional and typically consist of full stack developers, designers, PMs, and insight analysts
• The teams are focussed around reaching core objectives for the year. Some of our objectives for this year include: launching a leasing proposition, increasing sales of in-stock cars, increasing dealership groups engagement
• We love Ruby, JavaScript, Git, TDD, and OSS and use a bunch of other technologies daily; Haml, Sass, Heroku, AWS being the most usual suspects