Backend Engineer

Description

Job title: Backend Engineer

Company: iwoca

Location: London

Salary: Competitive

Who are we?

iwoca is breaking down the barriers that stop Europe’s 20 million small businesses from accessing finance. Traditional bank loans have slow application processes, inflexible terms and burdensome criteria. In contrast, we use cutting-edge technology to offer flexible access to credit with a five minute application process and a decision in hours.

Since 2012, we've made finance available to over 50,000 businesses across Europe and lent over £1 billion. Our customers include everything from cafés to car dealers, salons to solicitors. Along the way we have built a sophisticated technology platform, won numerous awards and grown a fun, and vibrant team.

However, we’re still near the start of our journey – our aim is to finance a million small businesses within a decade and so we need more smart, hands-on people to help us reach this goal.

About the role:

At iwoca we are dedicated to building the smartest lending platform in the world as we believe that finance should be as simple, seamless and powerful as electricity. We like to use Agile(ish) processes, which means features or projects go live in days or weeks rather than months or years.

We run our Django-powered site on AWS, use asynchronous tools (Twisted, Celery) for time-consuming tasks and scientific libraries (numpy, scipy, pandas) for risk aspects. Application orchestration is done with Docker and Ansible and our monitoring is set up using StatsD, Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana.

Here's an overview of your responsibilities:

• Research, design and build solutions to business problems by breaking them down into defined tasks and delivering these - or helping others to
• Design clear technical solutions for business requirements, even when these are tricky or ambiguous, with consideration for how iwoca is scaling
• Make sure we're writing robust, high quality code: you'll not only ensure your code is tested, but that you're testing the right things
• Debug issues in production and follow them through until they've been resolved
• Review code written by other developers. You should write useful, actionable feedback and help identify learning opportunities for less experienced developers where possible.
• Proactively identify ways in which we can improve our code base by suggesting areas we can refactor or deprecate, or fixing bits that generally don't make sense
• Communicate effectively with the rest of your team. You'll make sure everyone knows what you're working on and how it's going, whether it's by attending stand ups, writing great commit messages or explaining how you're approaching a problem to others
• Grow as a developer by seeking and taking on feedback, asking others for help and taking on tasks you've never done before. And, where you can, helping others to do the same.

Requirements

• Proven experience in Backend Programming (ideally in Python)
• Degree level of education or equivalent industry experience
• Understanding of key computer science principles including algorithms, data structures and computational complexity theory
• Ideally experience developing Python
• Familiarity with / exposure to other programming languages
• Knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases (ideally MongoDB and PostgreSQL)
• Knowledge of web frameworks (we use Django)
• Demonstrable experience creating robust, clever and scalable applications
• Experience doing it all: designing, developing, testing, deploying and maintaining
• Ability to manage projects, priorities, deadlines and deliverables (being autonomous is extremely important for us)
• Desire to continue learning and developing skills

Benefits

What’s life like as an iwocan?

We all enjoy:

• Bright, modern office spaces in Tottenham Court Road and Covent Garden
• Two company retreats a year (in places like the French Alps or Spanish seaside)

• Pool, ping pong, foosball tables and tournaments and yoga
• An ever-growing number of clubs including climbing, chess, football and boxing
• Plenty of drinks and snacks in our office kitchen
• A paid volunteering day each year, for you to support your chosen charity

Just for you:

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership
• Stock options
• Enhanced maternity and shared parental leave
• A workplace nursery tax benefit scheme
• 25 days holiday per year and an extra day off on your birthday
• Extra leave if you want to travel or study
• Special celebrations for anniversaries and long service including sabbatical
• Flexible working
• Cycle-to-work scheme

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• Tickets to tech conferences across Europe
• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers
• A calendar of meetups we host at our office
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse if you want to learn to code.