Senior Front End Engineer

About us
Technology, Data Science and AI are at the heart of Gousto. The code we write powers every aspect of our business from the recommendation engine powering our e-commerce experience right down to the genetic algorithms used to efficiently route boxes in our warehouse.

We use the latest technologies to create simple and elegant solutions to complex problems. We’re ‘all in’ on AWS using many of its services. Our platform and continuous delivery pipeline is fully automated using Cloudformation & Ansible, we release code to production multiple times a day and we’re in the process of moving our microservices architecture to containers. We build our services in Python, PHP and Node.js with a significant proportion now delivered via AWS Lambda.

Our next generation frontend is built using the best of cutting-edge web technologies – ES6 JavaScript, PostCSS, React and Redux. We’re migrating away from a PHP Laravel solution (we are almost there!). This year we’re aiming to introduce GraphQL to help improve the performance of our apps and increase velocity within our teams.Join us on our hugely exciting and rewarding journey!

The Role
To support this growth, we’re looking for an experienced and hugely talented Senior Frontend Software Engineer to help us take our technology platform to the next level. As a Senior Frontend Software Engineer at Gousto, you’ll be working closely with other senior members of the Engineering team to help shape our architecture, our engineering processes and help to build a massively talented engineering team.

Our ideal candidate will have demonstrated an ability to apply their broad and deep technical skills within a commercial setting and will always be striving to solve real business problems using the most elegant technical solutions. We want someone with proven technical leadership skills and a solid understanding of what it takes to design and deliver scalable, elegant, cloud based systems in a highly available manner.

Most of all you’ll be passionate about making Gousto a success.

Key Responsibilities
Leading our migration to React – We truly believe that frontend development is as much of an engineering discipline as any other. We dislike “hacky” HTML with a bit of JQuery. We prefer a well structured frontend application making use of React, Redux and other libraries in the React eco system. We’re part way through migrating to this new architecture and we’re looking for someone that can help us continue this journey.

Continuing to evolve our Agile development process – We use Scrum, we like it and we believe it aligns with Gousto’s delivery led culture. However, we also understand that our processes aren’t perfect and need to evolve as we grow. We’re looking for someone who’s seen Agile delivered in complex engineering environments across multiple teams.

Help to “Raise the Bar” – We believe that one of the most important things our senior engineers do is educate the more junior members of the team. We’re looking for an Engineer that can bring new and innovative engineering practices into the team, someone who is willing to help educate and help to improve what we do on a daily basis.

Obsessing over quality & performance – As one of our most senior engineers you should obsess over the quality of what the team delivers. Whether that be the quality and maintainability of our code or making sure we identify and squash every bug out there. We’re also an e-commerce business, we understand that every millisecond counts when it comes to page speed and we want you to help us make our site fly!

Building a world class engineering team – We are just at the beginning of our journey and will be looking to significantly invest in engineering talent going forwards. Helping to build a truly great team of engineers will be a hugely important part of what you do.

Key capabilities

• At least 4 years of deep knowledge and experience of OO Javascript
• Experience with libraries from the React ecosystem
• Experience with speed optimisation best practices
• Experience with mobile first development (CSS & JavaScript best practices)
• Experience with latest JavaScript features, using ES6 & es.next
• Experience in configuring webpack and CI / deployment processes
• Experience with unit testing and end to end testing
• A proven track record leading technology teams in complex engineering environments. Ideally you’ll have had delivery responsibility across multiple teams.
• Worked within a Devops organisation. At Gousto our developers are responsible for the operational health of the services they develop. We believe this fosters a great culture and are looking for someone who knows how to handle those rare but critical production issues.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, whether to the engineering team, to business stakeholders or to our leadership team.

We are hugely committed to equality of opportunity in all areas of Gousto. We employ over 20 nationalities and think it’s deeply important to have all genders represented in all functions and levels. All individuals will be treated in a fair and equal manner and in accordance with the law regardless of age, disability, gender, pregnancy and maternity, marital status, race, religion or sexual orientation. We know, based on research, that some people are less likely to apply for this role. Please consider the above bullet points as guidance (our perfect candidate may not meet 100% of them) and if you feel you would be suitable for this role then please get in touch.

At Gousto we feel it’s massively important to hire adults and give them the freedom to get things done. We don’t judge your performance by hours at your desk, but by the impact you have. While our office hours are 9am to 6pm, as long as people attend the morning stand-up for their squads the hours are flexible around this. Our only requirement is that you follow our ownership principles and Put Gousto First. Flexible working is widely practiced, but we are not a remote company and the majority of the time should be based in our Shepherd’s Bush office.

• “Tech 10%” – use every other Friday to sharpen your own skills and work on your own projects
• Holidays – 25 days of holiday (plus bank holidays) increasing by a day each year up to 30 days
• Option to buy additional days of annual leave up to a total of 30 days
• Discounted Gousto boxes – 40% staff discount on Gousto boxes and 25% for your family and friends plus your first box free
• Dr Gousto Healthcare via Babylon Health
• Access to Gousto Academy training courses
• Gym Membership
• Cycle to work scheme
• Pension
• Quarterly team socials and mixed team events
• Coffee/ Tea, fruit and ice cream provided every single day to keep you fresh
• Friday socials – Wine, beer and soft-drinks