Principal Software Engineer

We’re looking for a hands-on Principal Engineer to join our product engineering team. 

It’s an opportunity to work in a greenfield domain that’s ripe for technology disruption. How do we build systems that can balance supply and demand as we expand the service? What is the best way to measure the impact we have on families, and deploy improvements? How do we easily match families with the best childcare for them?

If you are the sort of person with a track record of seeing how software and systems thinking can really impact a business. Who thrives in an environment that loves to see you succeed. This is the position for you.

What we want this role to -

Do stuff that notably benefits KK - influential thinker, creates opportunities, impacts course of business

Help squads make confident choices on what they do next (this is different from “just doing engineering stuff”).

Work with super bright, less experienced team members and accelerate their careers (and the squads’ capability)

Find opportunities to do things better and then make that change happen.

Be a major contributor to the technical vision for the department.

Code. Every day.

About the team

The product and engineering team is composed of small squads focussed on different parts of the domain. With a fourth squad made up of  Manish (Chief Product Officer), James (CTO) and Michael (Head of Engineering) working to create an environment for squads to flourish.

Culture-wise, like the rest of Koru Kids, there is a high degree of openness and transparency. Squad members work together as much as possible and across disciplines. Engineers are experienced with pairing, test automation and have a disciplined approach to incidents. At the end of every week, we join the rest of the company to showcase and celebrate what we’ve accomplished.

Whilst we have titles we are not precious about roles - and team members are encouraged to reach out and engage with whomever they want. In fact, for this role - you should expect exec members to be coming to you, to seek out your advice and discuss ideas.

It’s most likely that this role will start off in the squad that looks after how we select and on-board nannies into the platform.

From a tech perspective, it’s Ruby (on Rails), JS (React) for the main platform - hosted on Heroku with GCP bits for serverless, pub-sub and data warehouse. We’ve also got an app that’s built in React native.

About You

You have led software projects of various sizes in the past, capable of breaking down nebulous problems into manageable pieces with your fellow team members

Track record of making a difference with software solutions that have created opportunities at company level.

You love shipping code and seeing how it performs in production and are therefore passionate about delivery pipelines, A/B testing, real-time analytics and monitoring tools.

You’ve established a reputation for software engineering at the places you’ve worked and also within the community.

Healthy disrespect of processes over just doing the right thing.

You are customer centric and work well with product managers, getting actively involved in strategy formation and customer and market research.

You have examples of where you have developed other people in your team 

You put the squad before yourself and the business before the squad - it’s not about personal recognition.

Your opinions are well regarded - sought out by CEO and has direct access to snr execs

Examples of coaching a squad to take calculated risks.

Bonus points for experience in childcare or marketplace technology business
 

Important things to know...

Timing: We'd like to have the right person join by the end of March but we can wait a little longer if we need to.

Flexibility: The role is full time but can be done flexibly. We welcome parents and would love to discuss any working arrangements that make it possible for you to be part of our team.

Salary: The salary range for this role is £100,000-120,000, depending on experience. We also have some awesome benefits — parents, among these is the ability to have a Koru Kids nanny for half price!

Location: You can do this role from anywhere in the UK and earn the same salary as you would if you were in London (where we are based). We welcome applications from people living outside London. Outside the UK is more complicated as it has tax and other implications, so we are less likely to hire someone living outside the UK.