Lead Backend Engineer

About what3words

Street addresses weren’t designed for 2021. They aren’t accurate enough to specify precise locations, such as building entrances, and don’t exist for parks and many rural areas. This makes it hard to find places and prevents people from describing exactly where help is needed in an emergency.

That’s why we created what3words.

What is what3words? We divided the world into 3 metre squares and gave each square a unique combination of three words. It’s the easiest way to find and share exact locations.

Position

what3words is looking for a Lead Back End Engineer to join the team who enjoys solving problems, leading teams and designing and building robust and scalable back end services. You’ll be working to grow and support the tech team, set a development roadmap, choose technologies and deliver projects. At what3words, we’re proud of our tech stack. We have built a massively scalable, microservices-based architecture, based around Kubernetes on AWS. You’ll be exposed to technologies such as ReactJS, Docker, Redis, AWS Lambdas, Prometheus, Grafana, Python, Athena, BigQuery, Java, Scala, C++, and Swift.

Your qualification

• 8 years Java/backend programming experience
• Knowledge of Docker/Kubernetes
• RESTful API design and implementation, working on B2B2C products and supporting external developers
• Experience with AWS/EKS
• Deliver software working full stack and cross-functionally
• Knowledge of DB schema design/maintenance (Redis/Aurora/Mongo/BigQuery etc)
• Experience as a technical lead for cross-functional teams, leading architectural decisions and working with other product and engineering leaders
• A passion for helping people grow and seeing them successfully navigate complex challenges
• Experience with data engineering/ETL pipelines a plus
• Ability to create a supportive and inclusive culture, listening to others, and finding the opportunities for your team to grow

What we offer

• 25 days holiday
• Share options
• Pension
• Bupa Healthcare + Babylon Health
• Bupa Rewards
• Cycle to work
• VDU eye tests
• Life Assurance
• Free breakfast & snacks
• Birthday vouchers
• Weekly lunch & learn sessions
• Regular team lunches & team socials
• Sports and hobbies clubs
• Tier 2 sponsorship available for candidates requiring a UK work visa