Backend Software Engineer

Job title: Software Engineer

Location: Uxbridge with flexibility to work from home

A bit about giffgaff:

Do you want to join a telecoms company that’s up to good? At giffgaff we do mobile differently. We call out the bad and find a better way. We’re laser-focused on flexibility, value and mutual good.

And we’re so proud to be a certified B Corp. This means we've joined a network of more than 1,000 UK companies, who want to make a positive impact on people and the planet. Working at giffgaff is something you could be proud of too.

You’ll get the best of both worlds, the energy and fast pace of giffgaff, plus all the benefits that come with being part of our parent company, Virgin Media O2.

Our business model is unique. We work with our members (our customers) to understand their needs in all areas of the business. We love this highly collaborative approach. Over the past few years our member base has grown steadily, and we’re still going. We’re always looking to acquire new members, and to do that we need the best people in our team.

Our bright and modern gaff is in Uxbridge, in leafy West London. But if commuting isn’t your favourite, most of our roles can be hybrid or work from home, or anywhere in between. If you like coming in, you’ll always find some office buddies. And if you like big occasions, we really bring the office to life monthly for our themed culture days. Plus all our giffgaffers come together at our legendary giffgaff summer, birthday and Christmas celebrations.

The role and the team:

Software engineering is at the heart of what we do here at giffgaff - our agile engineering teams build and support a set of applications and services that combined create our unique user experience on the giffgaff website, enable our internal teams to work in the most productive and efficient ways and enable a whole range of awesome features via modern APIs.  

The quality and maintainability of our software is very important for us, we are looking for engineers with real world experience, especially in terms of the whole development lifecycle.

You will help us design and implement tightly focussed APIs, services and user interfaces and, together with your team, you will support them in production. We want you to share your opinions on how we are doing things - and help us get better!

Key responsibilities: 

• Work with a full-stack attitude within a self-organising, cross functional product engineering team using extreme programming practices - notably pair programming and test-driven development

• Build, support and maintain automated, fault-tolerant, scalable products and solutions that are continuously delivered into our production environment

• Be technically curious, tackling problems without giving up, and producing solutions that less-experienced engineers can use, maintain, and learn from

Accountable for:

You’ll have to make tough decisions, implement best practice and provide compromises when situations are not ideal.  Oh and you’ll need to explain that to people. Not just the technical ones. Because we work in product teams where not everyone is a techie. It’s fun, you get closer to the business and know more about why we do what we do, not just how.

Our core technologies are Java, PHP & Python & React, and we like our engineers to be XP developers with a full-stack attitude. We’re looking for passionate programmers who are comfortable with using a variety of frameworks, languages & tools and are happy to pick up new skills when the need arises. 

Skills, experience and attitudes:

• Essential Skills: Reading & Writing Code, Debugging & Troubleshooting, IDE & OS Basics, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Clean Code & Refactoring, Version Control

• Desirable Skills: CI / CD, Algorithms & Data Structures,DI / IoC, Mocks & Stubs, Alerting & Monitoring, Functional & Non-Functional Testing, SOLID Principles, Containerisation & Networking Basics, Twelve Factor App Design, Solution Architecture

Plus competency in 3 or more of the following:

• Client-Side Engineering: CSS3, Cypress, ECMAScript (ES6+), HTML5, Jest, React & React Native, SASS, TypeScript

• Server-Side Engineering: Java 8 with Maven & Spring, JUnit, NodeJS, PHP with Laravel or Zend, Python

• Additional Technology: Apache & NGINX, AWS, Jenkins, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis & Oracle, Docker & Kubernetes, ElasticSearch & Kibana, Grafana & Prometheus, Kinesis

Our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion

At giffgaff we want to challenge the old way of doing things. People, and the way they work, define our culture and we encourage everyone to bring their whole selves to the gaff. That's why we believe in creating an equitable, fairer, more inclusive business that champions different ideas and perspectives. We may be sort-of-small but we're big on that caring, sharing thing & strive to create a supportive culture. 

As a lean organisation, our team is built of a diverse, spirited range of people who are multi-skilled, highly motivated and flexible.

In return for your outstanding efforts, you'll be rewarded with a competitive salary and excellent benefits. We believe that hard work should be supported and recognised.

If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.