Technical Lead

Job Description

carwow is looking for a Technical Lead to join the Engineering team in our Portuguese product centre of excellence working on a fully remote basis.

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 a Trustpilot rating of 4.7. We are also very 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.

Technical Leads at carwow works 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 lead engineer 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

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.

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, or Python.
• 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
• Equity in the company (share options)

• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and Christmas Eve

• Health: Private medical health insurance, free access to Sanctus mental-health coaching sessions

• Remote working: You'll receive a ‘home office allowance’ of up to €550 to help get set up with everything you need to succeed at home. We also have a new ‘work from anywhere for a month each year' policy in place should you wish to use it.

• Social: Company wide collaboration such as bi-weekly product demos, coffee with the exec sessions, culture club, social events (currently virtual).

*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.