Technical Lead (Ranking and Recommendations)

Depop is the fashion marketplace where the next generation buy, sell and get inspired. We are headquartered in London, UK with locations in Manchester, New York, Los Angeles and Australia. 🌍

We have almost 20 million registered users in 147 countries. In the UK, 1 in 3 Gen Z/Millennials are registered and in the US we have grown 300% over two years. As well as this, we are also the only European player to have recently entered the top 25 shopping apps by daily active users. 📈

We operate on three pillars:

Community: Our buyers, sellers and employees are inclusive, diverse and accessible. We are committed to empowering diversity within the fashion community. 💛

Entrepreneurship: We support our community and help them build their business with Depop. We thrive on supporting innovation by shaping an environment where creators, makers or hustlers can thrive. 🛍

Sustainability: Depop helps extend the life of garments and reduce waste, we care about the world and want to make a positive change within the fashion industry. ♻️

The Role

The Ranking & Recommendations Team

Our Ranking & Recommendations team looks after the search and recommendation platforms here at Depop - in order to ensure buyers on Depop find the most relevant items they are looking for during their shopping experience. The team is currently working on iterations to our search algorithm to further drive relevance, along with a strategic focus on building the next generation of search and recommendation platforms for Depop.

The Role

Lead the team building cutting edge search and recommendation systems that are delivering personalisation to over 20M users

Depop is looking for a Technical Lead to join one of our core cross-functional teams and have a key input into the future direction and delivery of search, recommendations and personalisation.

You'll lead a brilliant team of engineers that are building and delivering industry-leading search and recommendation systems. We're currently recommending 500,000 unique items per day to our user base, and performing over 1.5 billion searches per month, with both systems continuing to scale as our user base grows globally.

Initially, your focus will be on improving our existing search platform, with further greenfield projects on our 2021 roadmap to refine and build out the future of recommendations. All the while, prioritising your team's professional growth, championing best practice software development and reinforcing a healthy engineering culture.

You'll be working in a technically innovative environment, building high-traffic and scalable distributed systems that service 10,000s of concurrent users, mentoring and coaching other engineers, and iterating and improving your teams work based on short feedback loops. Sound like your thing?

Want to find out more about Depop & our engineering team? Take a look at our blog.

We write about technology, people and smart engineering - https://engineering.depop.com/

Responsibilities

• Driving the roadmap from a technical perspective, collaborating closely with Product and our VP of Search and translating ideas to code
• Helping your team design systems that can keep up with Depop’s growth
• Growing your team’s sense of ownership; from running their own services to monitoring, maintenance and reacting to production issues
• Ensuring timely delivery of your teams’ projects, which will ultimately have a tangible impact on Depop’s success
• Supporting a strong engineering culture, orientated on technical innovation, and professional development
• Ensuring your team follows our engineering practices, by leading from the front

Requirements

Technical:

• Experience building high-traffic systems servicing 10,000s of concurrent users
• You have experience of building Search, Recommendation, or Feed-based systems (using underlying search engines such as ElasticSearch, Lucene etc.)
• Expert knowledge with a high-level programming language (e.g. Java, Scala, Python)
• Strong knowledge of systems design, within a modern cloud-based environment (AWS, GCP)

Non-technical:

• Experience working in a B2C product-based technical environment
• Successful end-to-end delivery of your team’s projects; from scoping and translating business requirements into plans, to design, implementation and maintenance, whilst coordinating with other teams (and engineers).
• Good people management and mentoring experience; we want you to help shape and develop our people
• You’re experienced in improving your team’s way of working (e.g. testing, deployment, delivery)
• Reinforce the ‘you build it, you ship it’ mentality to your teams working methodology, ultimately, owning the underlying infrastructure
• Exemplary communication skills, especially in dealing with multiple stakeholders

Benefits

Depop offers the opportunity to work in one of the UK's fastest-growing scale-ups, with a vibrant and diverse group of people, building a product we all deeply care about, in addition to:

Learn and Grow: We sponsor and run a myriad of programs, conferences and meet-ups to up-skill our employees and enhance their journey with us, just ask! 📚

Wellbeing: We care about wellbeing. We offer a cycle to work scheme, healthy fruit and snacks in the office, breakfast every Tuesday, eye-care vouchers and a discounted gym membership. 🤸‍♀️

Mental Health: Mental health is a top priority for Depop. We offer subsidised counselling appointments through SelfSpace, have mental health first aiders and also run yoga, meditation and more. 💛

Work/life balance: We have 25 days of holiday with the opportunity to buy or sell 5 more, a day off for activism, and sabbaticals for our long-serving employees. 🏖

Family life: We offer flexible working (based on your team), generous parental leave policies, and, all of our offices are dog-friendly! 🐶

Financial: We match up to 6 percent on your pension based on qualified earnings and have retail discounts from benefithub. 💸

Fun: We love to celebrate our successes at Depop. On Friday we finish an hour early to socialise with free food, and have amazing Winter and Summer Parties. We also host internal employee socials such as quiz night, games night, movie night and more. 🍹

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