Head of Platform Engineering
Bloom & Wild
This job is no longer accepting applications
See open jobs at Bloom & Wild.See open jobs similar to "Head of Platform Engineering" General Catalyst.Software Engineering
London, UK
Posted on Nov 11, 2023
Hi, we’re Bloom & Wild. Founded in 2013, our mission back then was to make sending and receiving flowers the joy that it should be, by harnessing technology, brand and letterbox delivery. Together, we’ve fulfilled over 20 million deliveries (and counting!), making us the largest direct to consumer flower business in Europe.
We announced £75 million Series D funding in 2021 and that same year acquired bloomon in The Netherlands and Bergamotte in France. Now home to a family of three beautiful brands, we're expanding our gifting offering to other categories like cakes, candles and cocktails. This is all part of our ambition to build Europe's #1 direct to consumer gifting destination.
⚙️Technology at Bloom & Wild
The Platform team supports our six, cross-functional, Product Engineering squads and our Data Science and Data Engineering team. It’s a key part of our Technology team who build and maintain the solutions that power e-commerce, production and fulfilment, enabling our three brands to delight our customers every day.
Our platform uses technologies including Ruby and Rails and Python/ React, backed by PostgreSQL, Fargate/ECS on AWS, and Cloud Run on GCP. It exposes APIs that are used by our multi-brand Angular webapp and our native iOS and Android mobile apps. It also includes a growing number of (micro)services based on ECS Fargate and AWS Lambda, built using an Internal Developer Platform.
Most of our team is based in the UK or The Netherlands and works in a flexible model, with choice in how often they travel to the office. Our squads meet all in person at least once per quarter in order to maintain connections, collaborate on larger projects and have fun together.
You can read lots more about our technology stack and our culture over on our tech blog - Code & Wild
💻 What you’ll be doing
- You’ll lead the Platform Team, setting the strategic direction for the team as well as playing an active and hands-on role in delivering the roadmap. This means:
- Being a key member of the Senior Technology Leadership team, working closely with our CTO and other Technology leaders in shaping the future of our technology offering and our organisation.
- Owning strategic planning and delivery in the platform team, ensuring that the quarterly portfolio of work is effectively planned, estimated and delivered.
- Taking a hands-on approach to deliver the roadmap working closely with the engineers in your team.
- Collaborating with the data, product engineering and architecture teams to ensure we deliver a great experience to both our customers and the rest of the engineering team.
- Line managing the platform engineers, focusing on their growth and development, and ensuring that the team has the skills and experience that it needs to be successful.
- Managing our infrastructure costs and relationships with suppliers such as AWS and GCP
✅ You’ll love this role if you… (What excites us)
- Have previous experience managing a platform team, backed by a minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in a hands-on platform engineering role.
- Have demonstrable knowledge of AWS public cloud. Our technology stack includes key services such as ECS Fargate for container orchestration, S3 for storage, RDS, ElastiCache, DynamoDB for data stores. We also use serverless related technologies such as AWS Lambda, and asynchronous execution patterns such as EventBridge, SNS and SQS.
- Have a good understanding of web services and APIs, and how network traffic gets routed from and to the internet into different services in AWS (e.g. load balancing, API Gateway technologies).
- Have experience with CI/CD pipelines, and understand best practices around deploying changes to both applications and infrastructure in a fast, reliable and safe manner (we currently use GitHub Actions and Terraform Cloud).
- Understand Infrastructure as Code principles, and more specifically have experience with managing infrastructure in Terraform.
- Can effectively use observability tools (metrics, logs, traces) to understand the performance of applications and infrastructure, and diagnose where problems are, and where improvements can be made.
- Are keen to learn and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and value sharing your knowledge with your peers.
- Experience working on an e-commerce site or in a fast-growing (preferably consumer-facing) start-up.
- Hands on web application development experience, and a good understanding of what the usual pain points of software engineers are.
- Know about distributed service architectures, including what infrastructure and best practices to follow to ensure data integrity, stability, replayability, and debug common issues and bugs related to them.
It would be great if you also have...
These are some of the skills and experience we think will enable success in this role, but please don’t worry if you are missing some of these. We’re committed to building a team made up of different strengths, skills and experiences, so if you’re excited about our values, passionate about what you do and would like to join us in doing things more thoughtfully, we’d love to hear from you.
🌟 (some of) The good stuff
To care wildly for our customers, firstly we care wildly for our teams. We work hard to craft a culture of thoughtfulness and care, where there is a strong sense of inclusion and belonging, enabling all of our people to thrive and be successful each day.
🌻 Work that works for you
- Flexible working : our core hours are 10-4, but outside of these hours you can start or finish your day when works best for you
- Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year
- Share in our success with a choice to take equity options
- Enhanced family leave policy and a workplace nursery scheme
- 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart
🌴 Time off
-25 days’ holiday + your birthday and bank holidays each year
- Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar
- Option to buy an extra 5 days’ holiday each year
🌱 Health and wellbeing
- Health cash plan through Simplyhealth
- Company pension scheme
- Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions
- Allies and champions groups
- Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers
- In person or virtual yoga every week
- Cycle to work scheme
- Our office kitchen is stocked with drinks and snacks to keep you going
- Financial wellbeing support through Bippit
🌳 Growth & Development
- A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme
- Access to the Goodhabitz learning platform
- Mentee and mentor opportunities with our external partners, such as The Women's Association and Mentoring for Growth run by Future FoundersInternal & external Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics
💐 Moments that matter
- Social & wellbeing monthly calendar
- Summer and End of Year events, team lunches and post-peak celebrations
- Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!
🏡 Belonging at Bloom & Wild
- We know that we learn through our differences, and building a diverse team has always been central to creating the best experience for our customers. We value all backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and experiences, and encourage everyone to share their opinions openly within our caring and inclusive team. Our champions community actively advances our culture of inclusion and belonging, which is organised around 8 pillars of diversity. These cross-business networks offer additional opportunities for connection, education, support and celebration, and ensure that inclusivity continues to be embedded in our ways of working.
🫱🫲 Getting hired
We’ll do everything we can to make sure your interview experience with us is a good one. It’s a 2-way process, and we’re keen to answer all of the questions you may have, so that you can be sure (and excited!) that we’ll be the right place for you.
- Apply below (it takes 2 minutes!)
- Chat with Billy, our Senior Talent Manager for Tech to discuss our role and learn a bit more about your skills and background and how we might match your career & development goals.
- Interview with Steve, our VP Engineering to get into more of the detail.
- Show us how you work through a technical challenge, which will be a live paired whiteboard session.
- Final chat with Steve, our CTO and Oskar, our Director of Architecture.
We believe in leading change for good, so if there’s anything that we can do to help throughout your application process, or if you have any feedback, please share this with us anonymously here so we can use this to improve your experience.
This job is no longer accepting applications
See open jobs at Bloom & Wild.See open jobs similar to "Head of Platform Engineering" General Catalyst.