Data Engineer (Platforms)
COVID-19 UPDATE: We are continuing to interview, hire, and onboard remotely. All of our engineering staff are working from home following the UK government’s advice. We shipped everyone’s tech gear and office chairs to their homes and we’re working to ensure everyone is comfortable. We’re expanding on our existing remote practices, and holding some fun online events too!
Who We Are
tails.com is an e-commerce platform and subscription business. We deliver tailor-made dog food to over 150,000 dogs every month. Every single bag we ship is unique — which is no mean feat when you produce 11,000+ per day. We own the whole experience, from our landing page to the customer’s front door. We use Python everywhere we can, including in our factory.
What You'll Do
You’ll work on our core data platform, helping to build the systems and tools that power our data ecosystem. We work closely with other Engineering teams and a growing community of Analysts and Data Scientists to make sure that we can continue to collect, manage and leverage data from across our business as we scale.
In this position you’ll get to:
- Work with the ‘Modern Data Stack’, using ELT tools like Singer (orchestrated by Pipelinewise/Meltano), dbt and Snowflake to collect and order our data.
- Build with cloud infrastructure technologies such as Terraform, Kubernetes and the AWS platform.
- Lead in data discussions, promoting data best practices in design reviews and planning sessions across engineering, analytics and data science.
- Contribute to both our own platform and to the Open Source community. We are strong believers in Open Source, and are regular contributors to several of the tools we use.
- Participate in bi-monthly hackdays to build or learn absolutely anything you want!
We'd like you to be comfortable with:
- Python 3. Airflow, Singer, Flask and pandas experience is all beneficial, but not required.
- SQL (Postgres/Snowflake/Redshift), with experience owning a Data Warehouse.
- DevOps experience in deploying and running production services in AWS/GCP/Azure.
- Experience with distributed compute concepts, including eventing and the fundamentals of MPP architectures.
We ship early and often, so we push multiple deployments live per day through our CI/CD pipelines. Our local development environments have setup guides and it’s possible to ship something on your very first day. We like to keep the code review process friendly and supportive so everyone can learn and grow. We also make space in our sprints for learning and development time, and hold in-house workshops on new technologies.
What Makes Us Different
We prioritise work-life balance. We have flexible hours (start 7-10 am, finish 4-7 pm) and if you’re working remotely you’ll have the same schedule. You are never expected to reply to Slack messages outside of your working hours.
Our teams are free to choose their technology stack. We bias towards using Open Source tools (managed ourselves) where possible but also use market-leading SaaS tools (like Snowflake) when it makes sense to.
We don’t use algorithm puzzles in the hiring process. After a phone interview with an engineer, you’ll get a short take home test directly related to the work we do everyday. After that, we’ll bring you in for a round of interviews. Usually two and a half hours, during which you’ll speak to two pairs of engineers and our head of engineering with small breaks in between.
We like to hear our employees' voices. We also use anonymous polls (we publish the results internally) as well as live anonymous Q&A questions to the CEO. We won “The Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work for 2020” award.
You Are Welcome At tails.com
You are welcome at tails.com no matter what you look like or where you come from. We are actively seeking a diverse pool of applicants, including those from historically marginalised groups. We believe that a diverse company is a powerful company. It’s through our differences that we will innovate and change the world of pet food for good.
Work in an office full of dogs, with a team full of ideas. Plus these awesome benefits:
- You’ll get a competitive salary, reviewed annually, and from day one will be a shareholder in tails.com.
- We’re proud to be on a high growth trajectory and offer the chance to work in an environment and with a team that will constantly challenge, support and develop you.
- You’ll start on 25 days of holiday which will increase in the time you’re with us. On top of this, we offer optional unpaid leave and a paid volunteer day each year.
- For expectant parents, we have extended maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption pay.