Lead Engineer

About Gousto

Gousto is the UK’s leading recipe box company delivering precise ingredients, delicious recipes and a dollop of adventure to thousands of homes across the UK.

As one of Europe’s fastest-growing independent companies, you’ll be part of an exciting, expanding team and trailblazing company.

Food and tech are at the heart of what we do. Using industry-leading technology, we’ve connected over 6 million people to delicious food so far. By 2025 we’ll have delivered 400 million delicious meals to dinner tables across the country... and we’re only just getting started.

Our mission is to reduce food waste and we've committed to cutting down the plastic in our boxes by 50% by the end of the year, this is one of the larger projects the team are working on at the moment.

Join us and let’s dream big and deliver bigger. Unbox possibility.

The Opportunity

The code we write powers every aspect of our business from the menu recommendation engine to driving our supply chain. We are a scale up business on a steep growth trajectory, and with that comes the need to build a platform that can scale. In parallel to this, we need to expand our team, evolving effective tools and processes that ensure we can continue to deliver quality code at pace.

Our platform is entirely cloud-based, and many of our backend services are now delivered via AWS Lambda. Our continuous delivery pipeline is fully automated and we release code to production multiple times a day. We’re in the process of moving our microservices architecture to containers.

Your skills and experience will help us move to the next level. We know we’ve got lots of things right but we also have many things still to improve. Right now we’re working on creating robust seed data for testing and flexible developer environments for coding.

We are making huge investments in technology, and plan to triple the size of our team to over 200 people in the next few years. As well as providing lots of career growth for our team, there will be plenty of opportunities to lead, mentor, influence and learn.

What’s it really like to work here?

• We are customer-centric, data-driven and outcome-focused, using lean principles to work iteratively, experiment and learn fast.
• We work in cross-functional squads which we are slowly evolving to include business partners. This allows us to work more closely with our colleagues in food, operations and marketing, enabling greater alignment, collaboration and innovation.
• Our squads have a high level of autonomy to decide both what outcomes they should pursue and how they will achieve them.
• We believe in being agile rather than committing to a single framework. We have a set of lean and agile principles which we follow, but beyond that squads are empowered and encouraged to tailor their working processes.
• We discourage pigeon-holing which means our engineers are responsible for designing, writing, testing, deploying and maintaining their code in production. We don’t have QAs, and our architect works closely with squads to consult and collaborate.
• A DevOps culture is central to our way of working and our squads are responsible for running their solutions in production.
• Pairing and TDD are practices we champion and want to keep improving.
• 10% of our time is dedicated to tech innovation and we hold regular brown bags.
• We are committed to being involved in the wider tech community, hosting meetups, speaking at events and sharing learnings via our blog.

What skills and experience will you need?

• Coaching and mentoring other engineers.
• Deep knowledge of a high-level programming language - but it doesn’t need to be a language that we use here. Great engineers learn quickly and are keen to adopt new languages.
• Designing and delivering scalable, distributed, cloud-based systems in a highly available manner.
• Working with async and event-driven architectures.
• Experience of CI/CD tooling and responsibly running solutions in production, working with logging, monitoring and alerting stacks.
• A good understanding of lean product discovery and delivery practices.

What we look for in a great Lead Engineer

Great engineering - and this is so much more than writing great code. As well as an excellent knowledge of software craftsmanship, you’ll have a test-first approach and know what automated testing to apply at which level of the stack. You’ll have great design and architectural knowledge and plenty of experience of maintaining your code in production.

Leadership and Coaching - you are highly proactive, you take ownership of problems and propose solutions. You create forums to drive good principles and practices across all of engineering. You mentor and coach all levels of engineering using your knowledge and experience to drive improvements across the team.

Outcome-focus - you develop a deep understanding of the problem you’re solving before you build it. You are product-oriented and customer-focused, balancing technical direction with business value. You know when to compromise and when not to.

Lean delivery - you deliver rapidly in small batches, reducing risk and creating a fast feedback loop. You have a continuous improvement mindset, constantly seeking to reduce waste and avoid re-work.

Growth mindset - you are curious and are always looking to learn. You encourage a culture of learning, emphasising the importance of breadth as well as depth of knowledge. You value feedback as a learning tool, and you offer constructive feedback with empathy.