The Smartians
We are a creative and ambitious bunch of engineers, hackers and entrepreneurs who love building awesome technology that can make a difference. Our skills range from robotics and AI to industrial manufacturing and software engineering and have worked for some of the largest organisations in these fields including Google, Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Morgan Stanley and Ansys just to mention a few.
We have one clear vision and we are using all the tricks in the book to get there; we are highly collaborative, ask a lot of questions and we are continuously trying to simplify and clarify the steps needed to achieve our goals. We like to properly plan before executing, we create engineering design documents, architecture models, we prototype and only begin implementing once we reach consensus. We embrace change, we adapt as we walk the path and we strive to grow the team by hiring better, smarter people than us. Oh and we enjoy good, as well as bad, jokes.
Where you come in
We have a wide tech stack which starts with moving data out of the factory using a gateway installed in the client’s premises. We then persist the data in a data lake and move it through queues into specialised databases which make it easily accessible. A backend makes the data available to either a frontend where it can be explored by the user, or to artificial intelligence services which train various machine learning models. We already use automated scripts to do cloud or on-premise deployments of the stack.
You will be our second all-round midweight backend engineer but with focus on API design, implementation and maintenance. You will also be trained in Rust (which we actually use in production!), Machine Learning, Operations (mostly with Ansible and AWS) and quite a few other areas as our team members get exposed to all parts of the stack.
For success you should already have a proven background of designing and implementing robust and scalable software in Python and you are familiar with the Django framework. You’ll have hands-on experience in APIs and making them easy and pleasure to work with. You should be comfortable architecting a solution, gaining feedback and reaching consensus with the team on the approach and would be able to deliver it with help and guidance from senior developers from the team. You enjoy helping the team with thorough code reviews and you also embrace constructive critique - in the end it’s all about delivering the right solution and learning along the way.
During this role there will be a clear path and opportunity to grow not into a senior role, but also into a backend lead position for the person with the right will, aptitude and drive.
Interesting technologies that we either use or we like a lot (in no specific order): Ansible, Vagrant, Proxmox, MQTT, OPC-UA, RabbitMQ, Kdb+, PostgreSQL, Git, Python, Django, Rust, Protocol Buffers, REST, RPC, React, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Jupyter Notebooks, ELK, Sentry.
Benefits
- Compensation around 35k per annum.
- Company profit sharing scheme.
- Remote-first team. While most of us are located in the UK, we are hiring anyone anywhere, as long as they meet our core working hours. We already have some people in far away countries.
- Move to the UK - if you want to come and work in the UK we can sponsor you.
- Flexible working hours. We have core hours of 10 to 15 UK time where people are generally expected to be online (but silent days are also fine), and when you do rest of the work is no one’s concern.
- Dedicated time for training and development. We are aiming to spend a day of every sprint (2 weeks) on work-related training. That’s almost a month of training a year.
- If you are sick and need time off - you got it, this includes mental health. And don’t even think about burning your PTO for it.
- Family health cover.
- Pension scheme.
- Home office budget, besides the hardware you need for success (we strongly recommend our threadripper 64gb, ssd workhorse desktops for backend developers, but you tell us what you like hardware-wise!)
- 24 days holiday plus bank holidays and no-nonsense approval. What that means is that there is no holiday approval system at all, instead you just take them when you want them. We trust one another to ensure minimum work disruption.
At Smartia, we embrace diversity, bringing different people, with different backgrounds and different expertise together to build a stronger, more resilient company. We are committed to equal employment opportunities and we want to ensure that our recruitment process is accessible to everyone. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation during the process, please do not hesitate to let us know.
How to apply
If you would like to apply please check our backend challenge at
https://github.com/smartia-tech/mideweight_backend_test and follow the instructions there. Every complete pull request submission will automatically get you invited into 1-2 hour call with our Head of Engineering and, if at all possible, one more team member to review your solution and technical fit.