Flexa
carwow • London, United Kingdom

Technical Lead

Employment type:  Full time

3–4 days/week at home

A little flex time

Dog friendly

Job Description

We're looking for a Technical Lead to join our Engineering team in London. We support both hybrid working and fully remote depending on your location within the UK.

About carwow

Buying or selling a car shouldn’t be difficult! That’s why here at carwow we are on a mission to change the way people buy, sell or use a car by creating the world’s best online car marketplace. We're not all petrolheads - just a highly driven (excuse the pun) scale-up with over 300 carwowers in the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal .

Since starting our journey in 2011, we’ve grown to become one of the most trusted comparison sites with over 12 million users and we're proud to be backed by some of Europe’s most respected technology, marketplace and automotive investors.

About the role

This year we plan to add 5 new squads to our product organisation as we continue to build on our customer proposition and to support this growth and help us scale we need experienced senior engineers and technical leads.

A technical lead at carwow is the lead engineer on a cross-functional product team of product managers, engineers, designers and data analysts. They play a key role in shaping the technical delivery of a product team by helping set up team OKR's that align with business objectives alongside product managers, scoping and helping the team break down strategic objectives into tactical work, ensuring technology architecture and principles alignment within the team, and coaching the team alongside engineering managers to deliver great customer experiences.

Core

  • Play the technical lead role within a cross-functional squad of developers, product managers, data analysts and designers
  • Discuss insights on how customers use our product and make suggestions for how we can constantly improve the user experience and grow the customer base
  • Lead the team in scoping how new features can be built, and how customer needs can be met while making pragmatic technical trade-offs
  • Write maintainable and performant code, with tests and documentation
  • Collaborate with your team on getting things done - review code and help out with constructive feedback
  • Monitor and support your team's software in production.

Strategic

  • Define a roadmap of experiments and initiatives to grow the paying customer base of carwow alongside a product manager
  • Contribute your expert opinion on the scope and feasibility of the initiatives your team considers
  • Help shape the technical strategy for our approach to experimentation in the product
  • Be a good strategic delegator, understanding when to delegate tasks to the team and when to take ownership.

Tactical

  • Contribute to a diverse engineering culture based on customer-centricity, high-quality code, data-driven decisions, technical innovation and business impact
  • Develop and test product improvements that build customer growth
  • Collaborate with other technical leads and engineers inside and outside of the team, helping them to do their best work and deliver projects according to our values and brand
  • Understand the important technical differentiating factors of our product, and leverage those in our architecture.

Requirements

Your attributes

You may be just the right person if others have described you as…

  • Technically experienced
  • Collaborative
  • Impactful

Your previous experience

  • Have worked as a senior software engineer or technical lead, primarily working with Ruby on Rails, our core application framework (7+ years experience)
  • Have worked in a metrics-driven team, having a direct impact on the growth
  • Have designed websites and backend systems and APIs to a high standard of security, reliability and operability
  • Are familiar with some of the technologies we use to run our platform (Heroku, Docker, Terraform)
  • Enjoy leading distributed teams and working cross-functionally with product managers, designers, user researchers and other developers
  • Are keen to learn continuously, share your knowledge, communicate effectively and build a product in close collaboration with others.

How we will measure your success

We will know you're doing a great job when we see:

  • You’re delivering work that has measurable impact and value to customers – early and often
  • You lead your team to success, actively scoping work and driving projects forward
  • You’re fully engaged in the product development life cycle, helping to shape your team’s roadmap
  • You’re raising the bar for technical quality and sharing your expertise
  • You're comfortable mentoring engineers to help them progress to the next level in their careers.

Benefits

  • A competitive salary with equity in the company (share options)
  • 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and Christmas Eve or an alternative religious holiday of your choice*
  • Life insurance (4 x basic salary)
  • Private pension scheme (carwow will match contributions up to 5%)
  • Private medical health insurance with Vitality
  • Free access to Sanctus mental-health coaching sessions
  • The latest core Tech (Macbook Air or PC Surface Pro)
  • Home Office budget of £500/€550
  • Salary sacrifice benefits (i.e. cycle to work), Travel Loan
  • Subsidised gym membership (50% off David Lloyds, Virgin Active and Nuffield Health)

*if you are not religious, this day will remain as Christmas Eve in conjunction with usual Christmas Bank Holidays

CSR

We are leading the change to Electric vehicles and are conscious of the impact our industry can have on the environment. We’ve already planted over 45,000 trees to date as a thank you to those who leave us a review and are extremely excited about our new partnership with ‘One Tree Planted’, which we hope will increase the number to around 60,000 trees a year.

Working here

At carwow, we aim to create a culture where our team can thrive no matter where or how they work. With hybrid working (1-2 days in the office although more if you like), and a healthy home office budget of £500, we are also open to looking at alternative working patterns to ensure carwowers can work in a way that works best for them.

We’re also a curious bunch and benefit from a number of different training opportunities. We are big on celebrating successes, working collaboratively and have found lots of ways to stay connected as a team both virtually and in person.

With a team of over 25 different nationalities, we know a diverse and inclusive workforce creates a more innovative company. We have work to do to get us where we’d like to be, but are working hard to get there and have a number of key DE&I initiatives underway.

So, if you always aim to WOW through everything you do (check out more info about our values here), we’d love you to join us on our journey.

Company benefits

Open to part-time employees
Open to compressed hours
Enhanced maternity leave
Enhanced paternity leave
Shared parental leave
Work from anywhere scheme – work anywhere for a month each year!
26 days annual leave + bank holidays
Pregnancy loss leave
Teambuilding days

The FlexScore® is the result of a rigorous 2-step verification of a company’s flexibility

First we assess the flexibility options carwow provides and then we anonymously survey a statistically significant proportion of their employees to make sure carwow is as flexible as they say they are. Our assessment is based on the six key elements of flexibility: location, hours, autonomy, benefits, role modelling and work-life balance.

We ask the hard questions so you don’t have to.

Working at carwow

Company employees

350+

Gender diversity (male:female)

Male: 64% Female: 34% Other: 2%

Office locations

London, Munich, Madrid and remotely in Portugal

Funding levels

$55 million in 2021

Hiring Countries

Germany
Portugal
Spain
United Kingdom

Awards & Achievements

Most flexible companies

Most flexible companies

Flexa100 2024
Consumer Goods

Consumer Goods

Industry awards 2023
Most flexible companies

Most flexible companies

Flexa100 2023
Retail & Ecommerce

Retail & Ecommerce

Industry awards 2022