Experimentation Backend Engineer

Job Description

Company Description

Depop is the community-powered fashion marketplace to buy and sell unique fashion, with over 30 million registered users in more than 150 countries. Depop is a place for anyone to discover and celebrate their style on their own terms, and to feel good about their fashion choices by extending the lives of millions of garments.

The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in London with offices in Manchester and New York. Depop has approximately 400 employees dedicated to its mission of building the world’s most diverse progressive home of fashion, that’s kinder on the planet and kinder to people. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company.

Depop is an equal-opportunity employer. Our mission is to build the world’s most diverse progressive home of fashion. To do this, we encourage people from underrepresented communities to apply. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We’re continuing to build recruitment processes that are fair and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments required throughout your interview experience with us. Depop supports visa sponsorship, sponsorship opportunities may be limited to certain roles and skill sets.

Job Description

At Depop, Experimentation is a first-class citizen and we believe our success is a function of our experiment velocity. As an engineer in the ExpOps team, you’ll play a core role in ensuring Depop is equipped with cutting-edge, stable infrastructure, working with both first and third party software and services to enable data driven decisioning at scale.

Specifically, you’ll deliver against 2 key missions with their own technology stacks

Key Responsibilities

• Work closely with Product Managers, Analysts, Front-End and other Backend Developers to understand problems and to design solutions in the Experimentation & Analytics space
• Produce high-quality code that is well-structured and simple to understand that will be used by 1M+ active daily users
• Engage in a culture of continuous improvement by attending events such as blameless post-mortems, architecture reviews etc.
• You’ll independently own an entire lifecycle of medium projects of moderate complexity
• Maintain high quality documentation to support our features & services

Examples of problems you’ll solve

• How do we implement and scale real time data transformation to produce derived metrics?
• How might we hydrate runtimes with behavioural metadata for finer grain experimentation?
• Can we enforce data quality?
• Can we infer data ownership and use this for targeted alerting on quality failures?
• How might we enforce ‘you build it, you own it’ culture?
• What should our bot detection and defence strategy look like?
• Can we reduce experiment durations by introducing variance reduction techniques?

Qualifications

• Be capable to write high quality code in Scala / Java / Python
• Distributed datastores (e.g. Redis, Redshift, AWS Athena)
• Message queues: (e.g. Kafka)
• Experience building scalable web applications serving 10,000s of requests per second
• Experience working with RDBMS, ideally Postgres
• DevOps mindset (CI/CD pipeline)
• Ability to proactively find and solve complex problems independently, but also know when to seek guidance or help from your peers.

Highly Desirable

• Experience with Scala / Java / Python
• Willing to upskill to Scala if currently unfamiliar
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Proficient in testing solutions at different levels —unit, integration, etc—
• Experience with event-driven architectures, preferably using Kafka
• Experience with relational or non-relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS Athena

Nice To Have

• Experience with Experimentation or Product Analytics tooling (e.g. Optimizely, Amplitude)
• Experience with data quality packages (e.g. Great Expectations, DeeQu)
• Experience with full stack development (exposure to Typescript/Swift/Kotlin)
• Experience in using production AWS infrastructure, ideally with Terraform
• Experience working with Frontend Engineers (Web/Mobile)
• Degree level knowledge of Computer Science or related technical field

Additional Information

UK Benefits
Health + Mental Wellbeing

• Cash-plan or PMI - you have the choice of a healthcare plan that best suits you
• Subsidised counselling and coaching - we partner with Selfspace to provide you with the opportunity for a good conversation with a qualified person
• Cycle to Work scheme - choose between Evans or the Green Commute Initiative to help access a bike for your commute
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) - have access to a confidential support network of expert advice 24/7
• Mental Health First Aiders - we have trained individuals across the business to offer support and signposting

Work/Life Balance

• 25 days annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• 1 company-wide day off per quarter, for you to take some time for yourself and decompress
• 2 activism days per year for you to use for volunteering, demonstrations or internal initiatives
• We offer sabbaticals for our long-serving employees.

Flexible Working

We’re Flexa® accredited, meaning we offer genuinely flexible working.
MyMode is our hybrid-working model, designed to empower our employees to choose a working mode that works for them. MyMode is composed of 3 working modes: Flex, Office Based and Remote.

• Flex: we'd love you to head to your nearest Depop office once a week, but feel free to work from home the rest of the week.
• Office: Want to head into the office more? No problem, you can opt to be "Office-Based", with your very own desk.
• Remote: depending on your role you can request to be a remote worker, and only head into the office 4 times per year.

All of our offices are also dog-friendly! Do your best work with your best friend.
You can also apply to work abroad for 4 weeks of the year (in UK tax treaty countries).

Family Life

Our parental leave policies aim to support and enable parents to play equal roles in nurturing their families, in a way that is flexible and truly gender-neutral. Our full-time regular employees are eligible for 18 weeks of paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of their child. We also offer IVF leave, shared parental leave and paid emergency parent/carer leave.

Learn and Grow

• We offer budgets for conferences, learning subscriptions and more. We also sponsor and run a myriad of programmes, conferences and meet-ups to upskill our employees and enhance their journey with us.

Your Future

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension (Depop will match your contribution up to 6% of your qualifying earnings)

And finally, as a valued Depop employee we waive all of our employees’ fees when they sell on Depop so you can ship your sold items anywhere in the UK for free.