Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

THE CARWOW GROUP

Carwow Group is driven by a passion for getting people into cars. But not just any car, the right car. That’s why we are building the go-to destination for car-changing. Designed to reach drivers everywhere with our trail-blazing portfolio of personality rich automotive brands; Carwow, Auto Express, evo, Driving Electric and Car Buyer.

What started as a simple reviews site, is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe - over 10m customers have used Carwow to help them buy and sell cars since its inception. Last year we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service.

In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia, doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with over 1.1 billion annual views, sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million.

WHY JOIN US?

We are winners of the prestigious Culture 100 award that recognises the most loved and happiest tech companies to work for! We have just raised $52m in funding led by global venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners (an early backer of LinkedIn and Shopify) to accelerate our growth plans!

As pioneers, we’re always driving for new territory and positive change, so our work as a group is never done. Where others see difficulty, it’s our responsibility to see possibility – building new experiences, launching new titles and listening to drivers.

Being a part of Carwow Group means championing drivers and the automotive industry, acting as a disrupter and never being afraid to fail (but learning fast when we do!).

Our team of 500 employees across the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal are revolutionising car-changing and we are fast expanding our mission across every single brand and country we operate in, so jump in!

THE TEAM

As a remote-first and distributed team our mission is to create a technology-driven company where we are empowered to use our skills to solve difficult problems and scale the product.

With Engineers across Europe (UK, Spain, Germany & Portugal), you will join a team that knows how to work well together whilst being distributed and enjoy 4-5 trips to the London office for social and team bonding events each year.

To achieve this, we are looking to hire software developers who are passionate about developing simple solutions for complex problems. Successful candidates will work with our team in a full-stack position.

Our tech stack is primarily Ruby on Rail split across several rails applications to support our different services, all hosted on Heroku. We focus on improving engineering effectiveness and want to bring the fun back to coding. We don’t overcomplicate our tech stack and have focused on failing fast and learning over rigorous processes allowing our engineers to ship to production multiple times a day and have tooling in place to quickly identify and spot potential issues.

You'll be supported by one of our Engineering Managers who are there to help you with your career progression and ensure that the team you are on are working as well as they can - continuously improving!

We have a career progression framework that means you know what is expected of you and how you can progress through our career ladder and your EM will work with you to make sure you are happy, fulfilled, and doing the best work you can be doing.

THE ROLE

Staff engineers at Carwow will act like a paratrooper joining and working closely with existing cross-functional product teams, on a particularly challenging problem (a critical bug, a tough project) and being able to get productive immediately, working on unfamiliar codebase/area, different people or sometimes working in isolation. You will be sought after for your technical expertise and will be seen as a role model for Carwow.

You will work on cross-functional product teams consisting of product managers, engineers, designers and data analysts. You will work closely with a Product Manager and a Tech Lead on deciding what features to build for customers, break down and build features with the team, review code, mentor engineers, ensure operational excellence, and share knowledge broadly across the engineering organisation.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Working on big impact and highest priority piece of work for the company
• We love solving real-world problems!
• We work quickly, releasing code into production multiple times daily. You’ll see your code go live continuously.
• You’d be part of a growing team building a platform that will help define the future of car buying.
• We’re a curious bunch driven by a common goal of "How can we make it better?
• We work hard to ensure our people have the right level of autonomy, support and sense of purpose to really flourish in their careers.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Please note: We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've listed in this posting, so we’d encourage you to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not an exact match.

Time spent in software engineering roles is of course important, but we prioritise attitude, aptitude, and the kind of impact you’ve had over years of experience. Ideally, you’ll have:

• Have worked as a senior software engineer with Ruby on Rails with a proven track record of delivering large projects
• Can write code that can be maintained – with good documentation, tests, and structure
• Experience with the following: TDD, Kafka, Git, JS, Heroku
• Have worked in a metrics-driven team and care about the outcomes of your work
• Are collaborative and motivated by achieving shared team goals and take responsibility for product outcomes
• Can contribute to high-level technical strategy and decision-making, identifying opportunities for innovation and improvement
• Have designed backend systems and APIs to a high standard of security, reliability and operability OR have experience building end-end websites
• Enjoy working in distributed teams and working cross-functionally with Product managers, designers, user researchers and other developers,
• Are keen to learn continuously, share knowledge, communicate effectively and build a product in close collaboration with others

You’re not expected to be an expert in all of these technologies and tools, we are happy to support your learning journey. If you’re unsure about any of the above, please apply.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU

• Fully remote working role, with offices in London, Munich, Madrid, and Porto that you can work from
• 4-5 trips to the London office per year for social and team bonding events
• Competitive salary to fund that dream holiday to Bali
• Share options - when we thrive, so do you!
• Vitality Private Healthcare, for peace of mind
• Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner
• Enhanced holiday package, plus bank holidays
• 28 days annual leave
• 1 day for your wedding
• 1 day off when you move house - because moving’s hard enough without work!
• On your third year anniversary, you get 30 days of annual leave per year
• On your tenth year anniversary, you get 35 days of annual leave per year
• Option to buy 3 extra days of holiday per year
• Work from abroad for a month (due to popular demand, this offer excludes the moon).
• Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies
• The latest tech (Macbook or Surface) to power your gif-sending talents
• Up to £500/€550 home office allowance for that massage chair you’ve been talking about
• A generous learning and development budget to help you master your craft
• Regular social events:, tech lunches, coffee with the exec sessions, book clubs, social events/anything else you pester us for
• Refer a friend, get paid. Repeat for infinite money
• Lunch & learns and Carwow Classrooms with expert speakers who are here for a free lunch

Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.