Principal Engineer

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 3 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

Our Technology team of over 60 people sits right at the heart of our business. We build and maintain the solutions that power e-commerce, production and fulfilment, enabling our brands to delight our customers every day. 

The Engineering team is  six, cross-functional, Product Engineering squads, who each own their own business and architectural domain and are supported by our Platform, Architecture, Data and IT teams.

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.  We’re also looking at developing new domain driven services & microservices where applicable.

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

Working with the CTO and Director of Architecture to help drive technical direction, engineering best practices, principles and culture for the engineering team. Leading engineering work with hands-on coding on important projects, particularly complex technical work like service extraction, major new features or design refactoring. Collaborating with Product to seek out alignment on business priorities and the optimal sequencing and slicing of work. Supporting engineering teams to help them define domain boundaries, interface, abstractions, service decomposition that will allow us to scale our architecture. Actively contributing to growing the capability of the engineering organisation through a combination of mentoring and coaching, sharing perspectives and advocating for best practice. Evaluating new technologies for incorporation into our technology stack.

✅ You’ll love this role if you…

Have an excellent understanding of computer science fundamentals, like data structures, algorithms and system design, along with a strong grasp of practicalities of building scalable, distributed, event-driven systems. Use your experience to exercise excellent judgement on where and when to be idealistic versus where to be pragmatic. Have demonstrable knowledge and experience breaking down a monolith to a distributed system using best practices. Are a polyglot-developer, comfortable working in multiple programming languages, while having significant in-depth experience in at least one language like Ruby or Python. Care about the detail - you’re methodical and precise and deliver to a consistently high standard Build and maintain collaborative relationships,  that enable you to work with a range of different people and teams and allows for open and inclusive discussion. Are proactive - you take responsibility and initiative to get things done, are willing to roll up your sleeves get stuck in. Have an empathetic leadership style - you genuinely love delivering through others, and are comfortable guiding, evaluating and flexing your style to get the best from those around you. Are organised - you take a thoughtful approach to planning and prioritising your work A computer science degree, or technology-related degree, or demonstrable equivalent experience.

🌟 (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

- Electric car scheme

🌳 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 Oskar, our Director of Architecture to get into more of the detail.

- Show us how you work through two technical challenges:

1. A live paired programming exercise with team members and other principals.

2. A system-design question with Steve, our CTO and other team members.

- Final chat with Steve, from our Tech leadership team.

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.