Staff Engineer

Depop is the community-powered fashion marketplace to buy and sell unique fashion, with over 30 million registered users in more than 150 countries. Depop is a place for anyone to discover and celebrate their style on their own terms, and to feel good about their fashion choices by extending the lives of millions of garments.

The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in London with offices in Manchester, New York, Los Angeles and Sydney. Depop has approximately 400 employees dedicated to its mission of building the world’s most diverse progressive home of fashion, that’s kinder on the planet and kinder to people. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company.

Our Mission:

Our mission is to build the world’s most diverse progressive home of fashion. Our team is dedicated to enhancing and developing the Depop experience to serve the needs of our global community.

Depop exists to empower the next generation to transform fashion. We are a community-powered fashion ecosystem that's kinder to the planet and kinder to people. We give our audience something they can't get anywhere else - unique fashion, with amazing people and the chance to create a better future by showing up as their full selves, at full volume.

We operate on three values:

1. Circularity - We’re taking the circular economy mainstream. Changing people’s relationship with clothes and making it easy to choose options that are kinder to the planet.
2. Self expression - We’re a space for self expression that encourages millions to explore, connect and find their identities through style.
3. Opportunity - We’re building a home of fashion where everyone feels welcome and anyone can succeed on their own terms.

The Role:

Depop is searching for a Staff Engineer. We are looking for somebody to own and drive best practices, improve processes, provide support across the backend function and contribute meaningfully to the long term vision of backend engineering at Depop. As a key member of the team you’ll bring the expertise and experience to help to plan, architect and direct projects from inception to delivery.

Responsibilities:

Responsibilities

• Produce high quality code which is well-structured and simple to understand that will be used by 1M+ active daily users
• Own your code through its entire lifecycle, including deployment to production
• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by attending events such as book club, functional meet up, blameless post-mortems, architecture review and weekly R&D afternoons
• Listen to other backend developers & teams to understand problems and use that information to suggest and design solutions
• Collaborate on a daily basis with fellow developers to solve problems and write code
• Embrace the Agile way of working
• Assist teams in making technical choices that are able to withstand changing business environments.
• Recommend new technologies that can help increase productivity of our engineers.
• Supervise and oversee opportunities for collaboration around common technical projects.
• Ensure the software is produced to the required quality, reliability and scalability standards.
• Identify and address technical debt and risks that are likely to impact the performance of software in production.
• Regularly attend ceremonies to discuss projects, brainstorm ideas, and put forward solutions to requirements and issues.

Requirements:

You don’t need to “tick all the boxes” to apply!

• Able to analyze a complex problem and design a solution for it.
• Strong communication and influencing skills with the ability to create alignment across teams.
• Has a customer-centric and product-focused approach to problem solving.
• Able to apply a qualitative approach to problem solving.
• Proven experience in high-level programming languages, like Java, Scala and Kotlin.
• Proven experience in software design, development and deployment.
• Proven experience building complex, reliable, scalable systems in Cloud environments.

Desirable:

• Strong background in JVM languages: Kotlin/Scala/Java.
• Deep understanding of RDBMS internals, preferably PostgreSQL.
• Author of technical blog posts or conference speaker.

Development at Depop

We want to give our engineers the opportunity to learn and grow at Depop. So if you're keen to gain experience in another language or new area of engineering we can make it happen as part of your career journey with us. Depop offers the opportunity to work with such a vibrant and diverse group of people, building a product we all deeply care about.

Depop is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Benefits:

• Learn and Grow 📚 : We want to give our people the opportunity to learn. We offer a personal learning budget for every employee and also sponsor and run a myriad of programs, conferences and meet-ups to upskill our employees and enhance their journey with us.
• Wellbeing 🚲 : We care about our employees' wellbeing. We offer healthcare, an EAP (Employee Assistance Programme), a cycle to work scheme, weekly yoga sessions, a discounted gym membership and eyecare vouchers.
• Mental Health 🧠 : Our employees' mental health is a top priority. We offer Headspace access and subsidised coaching and counseling appointments. We also have trained mental health first aiders available.
• Work/Life Balance 🏝️ : We offer a hybrid working model to provide a healthy work/life balance for our employees. We have 25 days of holiday with the opportunity to buy or sell 5 more, a day off for activism to allow you the opportunity to make a difference and we offer sabbaticals for our long serving employees.
• Family Life 👶 : We offer flexible working, generous maternity/paternity and parental leave policies, which include adoption and paid time off for fertility treatments. We also offer life insurance, a pension scheme and parent and carer support.
• Office Life 🏢 : We provide healthy snacks, tea and coffee in our offices. All of our offices are also dog-friendly! Do your best work with your best friend.
• Fun 🍕 : We love to hang out with each other at Depop. On Friday we finish an hour early to socialise with free food, and have amazing Winter and Summer Parties to celebrate our successes. We also host internal employee socials, such as quiz night, games night, movie night and more...we’ve taken this virtual for now!