The Mission

At Wayhome we are reinventing homeownership by co-investing with people who haven't been able to buy a home yet. We’re a small team of developers, property specialists, data scientists and creatives, who are addressing one of the biggest and most life-changing problems our customers have: how they can get the security and freedom of homeownership for their families and for themselves.

Compensation

• £70,000-80,000
• Unlimited holiday (within reason, and minimum 28 day/year)
• A shiney-ish laptop, your choice of operating system (we are linux friendly).

Remote/COVID-19 situation

For the foreseeable future we are optimising for the majority of our team to be working remotely. We have an office in central London if you are unable to work from home. The current situation is a change for us, and we are still figuring out the best way to operate in this new reality. If there is some unusual way you want to work either short or long term, let us know, we are open to at very least discussing it.

The Role

This job is comprised of two equally important roles.
First we are looking for someone to take ownership of the platform that our development and data teams work on. Currently this a core Kubernetes cluster + healthy scoop of google managed services + some SaaS peripherals. Our business model probably isn't going to translate into a "web scale" infrastructure operation (it will probably have some interesting spiky moments though). Instead what we are looking for is to optimise for speed of development, accessibility of data, quick iteration, and robust security (more on that later). In the short term this will be about working as part of the various teams that are implementing (or reimplementing) the features we need to operate as a business, setting up monitoring and alerting, and paying down the considerable technical debt we have been accumulating. In the long term this part of the job is about shaping the way that we build our software, enabling the company to deliver better things faster and really wringing the most out of our cloud infrastructure.

Secondly we are looking for someone that's serious about operational and technical security. Our customers are trusting us with their life savings, a considerable part of their income, and their home and we need someone to keep them safe. We deal with sensitive personal and financial data from day 1 and are expected to hold that information safely and securely for decades. In the short term this will be about battening down the hatches of our existing tooling, defining policy, refining our processes, directing training for our front-line staff, organising penetration testing, and stopping the rest of us from cutting every corner in sight. You will be the voice in the room that always prioritises security before features, who looks at every angle of a thing we are building, and stays on top of the latest threats and how to mitigate them. Long term we want to have business where security is not a question mark at the end of every project, where all our staff can sign from one hymn sheet when it comes to operational security, and none of our vital data is leaking out onto the internet.

You will probably be the sole voice in the darkness on this front for a while, but the expectation is that you will add resources to this part of the team as the business and it's operations grow.

The Team

You will be working as part of a small and high trust product team that is focused on solving problems not pointing the finger. You will be supported by experienced senior developers when you need it, and left to get on with it when you don't. The wider company is incredibly talented and you will be working closely with them regularly. COVID-19 is currently interrupting our ability to get together and have fun, but we are still doing what we can (remotely) to keep each other laughing.

What we need

• Extensive knowledge of Kubernetes.
• Experience working with and securing sensitive information.
• Experience building systems with security in mind.
• Working knowledge of Google Cloud Platform and it's associated services.
• Working knowledge of common infrastructure (postgres, redis, pgbouncer, etc)
• Working knowledge of python based web development.
• Able to read, write and talk fluently in English.
• An ability to both educate and inspire others to not be completely terrible at their jobs.
• A decent(ish) human being

Other good stuff that we are interested in

Important to note, if you are reading this and worrying that you don't have experience with one, some, or any of the items on this list, please still apply. All of the things here are trainable and are not required for a successful applicant.

• Experience of python3 + async bells and whistles preferably in a web setting.
• Red team experience.
  
• Building data pipelines.
• Double entry accounting.
• Programmatic access to banks.
• Working knowledge of the UK property market.

Education

This is not important to us. We are looking for someone with front-line experience of building things on the internet.

Hiring Process

1. A member of the team you will be working with will review your CV. If we reject you at this stage, ask us why, we are happy to provide feedback.
2. A quick call, this is just to say hello, answer some HR questions (right to work in the UK, salary expectations, start date, etc) and check that you are really a human being. If you have any questions about the job or the company feel free to ask them here.
3. Next will be a short technical test. I'm not 100% on what this looks like, but kicking the technical tyres is an important step for us. You can see the kind of thing we are asking our prospective backend developers to do here: https://github.com/WayhomeUK/weather-service-backend. It will probably be something on the lines of deploying and securing a weather service like this to our kubernetes cluster.
   
4. An in person interview, (or whatever passes for an in person interview nowadays). We will do a little pair programming where we will be extended the work you have done in your technical test, talk though your experience, and try and determine if you will be a good fit for our team. We won't be asking you to do anything involving binary trees, or sorting algorithms, you won't need to drawn anything on a white board, you don't need to prep for it, and you will have access to a computer with an internet connection if you get stuck.
5. If that all goes well you will have the opportunity to meet members of our team and ask any additional questions you might have about the business or working at wayhome.

End to end this process shouldn't take more than a few weeks.

We currently have no plans to work with recruiters on this role, so no recruiters please.

Applicants must have the right to work in the UK as we are currently unable to offer sponsorship. Additionally, due to the UK leaving the European Union, we are only able to consider candidates who will still be eligible to work in the UK after 01/01/2021.