Engineering Manager

Bloom & Wild; London; On-site; GBP 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job description

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 care wildly about people and our planet. Which is why we’re so proud to be a certified B Corp – committed to making long-term positive change for our community, and the world around us.

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 driven by our vision to create the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful. And we won't stop at flowers and plants. Starting with the Bloom & Wild brand, 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.

There are seven, cross-functional, Product Engineering squads in our Engineering team, who each own their own business and architectural domain and are supported by our Platform, Architecture, Data and IT teams. You’ll be leading our Checkout & Payments squad, a close-knit, cross functional, team who help to ensure that our customers have a great purchase experience across our gifting and subscription ranges.

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

• You will lead our Checkout & Payments squad, reporting to the Director of Engineering (E-commerce).
• Being a key member of the e-commerce leadership team, working closely with Product and Engineering leaders in shaping the future of our check and payment offering, and executing on key strategic technical initiatives within the domain.
• Taking a hands-on approach to own delivery in the squad, ensuring that the quarterly portfolio of work is effectively planned, estimated and delivered.
• Line managing the engineers, focusing on their growth and development, and ensuring that the team has the skills and experience that it needs to be successful.
• In addition you’ll work closely with other Engineering Managers, Director of Engineering, Senior Technology leadership and community of practice leads to shape the technology and people roadmap and strategy going forwards, ensuring that we are improving the whole team and optimising the approach for more than just your squad

You’ll love this role if you… (What excites us)

• You will have a minimum of 4 years of relevant experience in a hands-on engineering management role where you have balanced delivery, technical quality, and people development.
• You can get stuck-in and code if required. While we don’t expect our Engineering Managers to be regularly coding, you will need to actively engage with the codebase so as to be able to understand the systems, support those within your team with technical challenges, break down requirements, lead estimation sessions, and understand the underlying complexities in the domain.
• You will be able to set a high technical bar, establish engineering best practices, champion technical quality, and push for continuous improvement.
• You’ll know when to build fast, when to optimise, and when to invest in long-term improvements.
• You’ve created environments that promote both informed autonomy and accountability. You’ll be a great coach and servant leader, able to motivate and guide the squad through the good times and the bad, learning and improving as you go.
• You’ll be able to demonstrate how you’ve taken responsibility for performance management, career progression and pastoral care.
• You’ll take a collaborative, data-driven and experimental approach to solving complex problems, and have the ability to foster this mindset in your teams.
• You like solving complex technical problems and have extensive prior software development experience of at least 6 years.
• Are keen to learn and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, and value sharing your knowledge with your peers.
• You have experience working with well-known third-party payment providers and have knowledge of financial, security and fraud trends.

It would be great if you also have...

• Experience working on an e-commerce site or in a fast-growing (preferably consumer-facing) start-up or scale-up.
• Have worked with RESTful APIs and ideally built new ones.

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.

Belonging @ 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.

Our ways of working

We really believe in the power of connection. For us that looks different depending on the team you work in. Some of our teams work together in person every day, whereas others may connect in person every quarter.

We also believe in flexibility that supports you, the work you do, and your team. How much you work from home and from our office depends on a balance of those needs, and you’ll agree this with your manager.

Whether it’s through a shared project, a learning and development opportunity, or an afterwork social - we trust our teams to make the right decisions (for them and us) about where and how they work each day.

We’re big on collaboration, empathy, knowledge sharing and growth, and our values drive our priorities every day:

Lead change for good: we have the guts to try new things and step up to do what matters most

Think deeply, act swiftly: we make sure there’s thoughtful rationale behind our approach and always act swiftly to implement ideas

Care wildly: we pour care and creativity into everything we do and pay attention to the things that make a difference

Stay open, be curious: we’re open about what we’re doing and why, and we welcome challenges from each other

Work that works for you

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.

Our perks and benefits include:

Flexible working & work from abroad

25 days holiday + your birthday + flexible bank holidays, & option to buy additional holiday each year

1 Volunteering day each year

Enhanced family leave and a workplace nursery scheme

A flexible training framework for every stage of your career

Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!

Share in our success with a choice to take equity options from day 1

For more information on our perks & bens, please see www.bloomandwild.com/careers

Getting hired

We know that job searching can be daunting, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that your experience with us is a good one. Interviewing is a 2-way process, and we’re keen to answer all of the questions you have, so that you can be sure (and excited!) that we’re the right move 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 Kev, one of our Engineering Directors, in order to get into more of the detail.

- A paired technical test and interview with some of the engineers that you’d work with day to day.

- Interview with our product team

- Final chat with Steve, our VP of Engineering and Joe our CPTO.

We believe in leading change for good, so if there’s anything that we can do to help you flourish throughout your application process with us, or if you have any feedback, please share this with us anonymously here so we can use this to improve your experience.