Engineering Director

Descrizione

iwoca started in 2012 and was born out of the frustration that small businesses lack the access to finance they need to reach their potential. Our belief then was that technology must enable us to significantly shorten the archaic 8-week bank application process which more often than not results in a ‘no’. Nearly a decade later and we have served more than 50,000 businesses across the UK and Germany with more than £2 billion of finance. Our personal best from a business starting an application to money in the bank is 3m26s (faster than Mo Farah on 1,500 meters). It’s a good start, but it’s just the beginning.

Our mission is to finance 1 million businesses, so still, a long way to go.

Through the course of our journey, we have learned that

• SME lending is a tech play at heart - processing applications from SMEs of all shapes and sizes is very complex, and the effective use of technology is essential for doing that at scale
• Embedded finance is the future for SME lending - businesses won’t need to go to banks anymore. We’re increasingly reaching businesses by embedding our finance offering through API integrations into the SME ecosystem including online marketplaces, accountancy systems, or neobanks
• Payments and credit are converging: Many businesses have cash-flow gaps because they receive money from their customers only way after having to pay their own bills. So we want to tackle the cashflow problem by offering loans, but also tackle the problem at its root by improving payment terms.
• We must continuously innovate in order to meet more of our customers’ finance needs - we won the BCR which helped us launch iwocaPay, and we're soon launching a revenue-based loan. We’re constantly evaluating new opportunities, and finding new ways that we can meet the financing needs of more small businesses.

We work hard to make iwoca a place where everyone feels welcome, where you can confidently be yourself. We understand that diversity isn't an optional add-on, it's the core ingredient of what makes us great.

About the role

You will be responsible for the build teams focussed on our internal facing products. You will work with our senior development team to create and lead iwoca’s backend tech strategy and vision.

Working closely with the Head of Engineering you continue to build a product focused and engaged team of developers who can realise the commercial goals of the company.

You should have a track record of hiring great developers and scaling teams. You will be responsible for creating the best in class ongoing recruitment process.

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/Terraform/ECS and our monitoring is set up using DataDog/Sentry.

The team is currently made up of around 25 developers covering multiple different build teams across the organisation. Some are managers and some individual contributors. We are in the process of scaling this team to around double this size over the next 6-12 months.

Responsibilities:

• Overall responsibility for a number of build teams across all aspects of the business, from credit assessment, to payments, to CRM.
• Lead on iwoca’s platform development strategy and vision
• Manage engineering leads from a number of build teams
• Maintain and improve on continuous learning development throughout the team
• Improve knowledge sharing across different build teams
• Own and improve iwoca’s backend engineering brand within the industry

Requirements

• Significant experience in managing developers
• Have worked as a hands on developer
• Deep software development experience with specialty in backend development
• Have a high level tech complexity understanding across our entire codebase
• Be commercially aware
• Ability to run projects from spec to delivery
• Proven track record of working collaboratively with developers, product managers and designers in multi-discipline teams
• Organised and can get things done
• A management style geared towards supporting, mentoring and growing engineers across the team.
• You care deeply about people, and their success.

Benefits

What’s life like as an iwocan?

We all enjoy:

• Bright, modern office spaces in London (Fitzrovia) & Leeds, and we support remote compatible working.
• A calendar of both in-office and remote events week including Bingo, Comedy Nights, Escape Room challenges….
• Two company retreats a year (in places like the French Alps or Spanish seaside).

• Pool, ping pong, foosball tables and tournaments.
• Virtual and in-office yoga classes every Tuesday and Thursday morning.
• An ever-growing number of clubs including climbing, chess, football and boxing.
• Plenty of drinks and snacks in our office kitchen.

Just for you:

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
• We take your well being incredibly seriously, so you’ll have instant access to emotional and mental health support services via our partner Spill.
• Share options.
• Enhanced maternity and shared parental leave.
• A workplace nursery tax benefit scheme. Save £££ on your nursery costs.
• 25 days holiday per year and an extra day off on your birthday.
• All the equipment you need to set up your home working space up.
• Paid volunteering time for you to support your chosen charity.
• Extra leave if you want to travel or study.
• Special celebrations for anniversaries and long service including sabbatical.
• Flexible working arrangements.
• Cycle-to-work scheme.

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

• L&D budget including a book budget to encourage you to keep learning.
• 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.