- Salary: £50,000 (negotiable upwards based on expertise)
- Equity: 2% options
- Location: Soho, London
About Us
Popsa is an e-Commerce startup that uses data to automatically create
personalised prints such as photobooks, calendars, posters, canvases,
and postcards.
Our mobile app is live in 10 languages and we ship to 38 countries
around the world. We're launching in new territories at a steady pace.
Our vision is to generate beautiful keep-sake mementos and personal
photo-diaries entirely in the background - selecting the best
user-generated content via machine learning algorithms before
programmatically designing an appropriate layout.
We print from the best facilities in Europe and deliver direct to your door within days.
Our aim is to build a subscription service to your memories;
your best photos carefully curated and lovingly presented, printed and
shipped to you each month - all without lifting a finger.
From an engineering perspective, we like to get things done properly and have maximum impact. Our Joel Test Score is 11.
You and the Role
Hours of work goes into getting an automated workflow right, so there
are very few things more satisfying than a successful build and deploy.
This is a central role having a unique perspective of the business
with an opportunity to craft optimal, automated workflows, and develop
our core APIs to support new products, suppliers and mobile/web clients.
We want this role to be grabbed by an engineer who prides themselves
on writing safe, stable and maintainable code, and who is passionate
about automating not only their own workflows but those across the
business. The role deserves a bright individual with a spark of creative
problem solving, paired with a sensible approach to risk.
Fast-Paced Growth
We have increasing traction with customers and are now looking to scale the business up,
so this role is for someone excited about the challenge of creating
technology that will set Popsa up for years of fast-paced growth.
New Challenges
Recently funded, we're now in a position to launch a range of new
products; this is a significant task that requires a re-think of some
key architectural decisions we made in our live platform. You'll be
working closely with the CEO and CTO to figure this out and launch a
solution by the Autumn.
We are constantly striving to improve Popsa, from UX, to customer
support, to platform architecture, so to help us improve even faster, we
have set a goal to migrate from our existing large APIs written in PHP
towards HTTP micro services and server-less functions (AWS Lambda) -
you'll take charge of this effort.
Popsa runs entirely on Amazon AWS services, so please only apply if you're familiar with EC2, Simple Queue Service, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB and API Gateway.
We're also looking for someone who is up for a challenge, there's a
lot of responsibility here, and we want someone who pushes themselves to
constantly improve. Do you have pet projects? Contribute to open-source
communities? Are you a regular at AWS Summit? You could be the right person for the job.
Education & Experience
Education is everything, but we recognise there are many ways to get
it. You could have a BSc/MSc in Computer Science (or a related subject)
but you might be a self-taught superstar. We don't discrimnate on
education, it's the results that matter.
Expertise
- RESTful APIs – you'll be designing and building new APIs for our mobile and web clients, and integrating with new partners and suppliers
- PHP - large chunk of our current codebase
- Object-oriented JavaScript or Go
- Structuring code for scalability and performance
- AWS Services - EC2, AutoScaling, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, CodeDeploy, VPC, CloudFront, Route53, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS, SES
- Package managers, like Composer and NPM
- Testing frameworks
- Automated Code Deployment - with tools like Jenkins or AWS CodeDeploy
- Linux - you should be very comfortable with Unix-style operating systems
If you have a few years of commercial experience under your belt
(freelance or employed) that's a definite bonus. Make sure you tell us
about it when you apply.
Ideally
- Documenting code and processes comes easy to you
- Together we will evangelise the benefits of automated workflows
Expectations
- We're a close and hard-working team; happy to share workloads and work late at crunch time, you'll need to be a team-player.
- We're sticklers for neat, maintainable, well-documented code that
follows the conventions for the language or framework you're working
with. We'll expect you to feel the same way.
- We work in an Agile team with quick iterations, regular deployments,
weekly sprints; it helps if you've experienced these working patterns.
- We're driving towards increased automation so we expect everyone to
contribute to this DevOps culture with high-visibility of application
performance.
- You'll be responsible for API development (architecture, programming, testing, documentation, and deployment), internal apps (such as our bespoke PDF generators and our customer support CMS) and platform stability/security (ensuring Popsa stays up and running whilst protecting our customer’s data).
Rewards
You'll receive a competitive salary based on your skills and
experience, but most importantly, you will also get to own part of the
business.
Popsa has an share options scheme that is open to all employees.
We'll tell you all about it as part of the interview process.
How to Apply
Right person for the job? Want to be part of a dynamic, young team? I want to hear from you personally! Email me at jobs@popsa.com with your CV and examples of relevant experience.
Salary is negotiable and dependent on level of skill and experience;
feel free to be honest and state your desired renumeration level.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Tom Cohen, CTO, Popsa