Software Engineer at Heron Data | Y Combinator

About the role

The role

• All of our engineers own business outcomes first, and implement technical solutions second
• As a Software Engineer, the primary way you would solve customer problems is by owning and shipping technical products & features
• What you work on will span across 1 to all of our surfaces — our customer-facing interface (frontend, UI / UX design), our backend infrastructure (APIs, infrastructure as code, application architecture), or machine learning algorithms (classification, NLP)
• You will also lead / contribute to the process & infrastructure needed to build, serve, and improve the way we ship products at scale; this could cover topics like branding, design, user research, testing, experimentation, measurement, monitoring, and other tools
• If you enjoy solving tough problems by deploying code, being part of a high calibre and tight-knit team, and seeing real impact from your work, this role could be for you!

What we offer

• Ownership and autonomy over solving problems that are key to the success of the company
• An outcome-focused, low-bureaucracy, engineering-first work environment with an emphasis on delivering customer impact at high velocity
• Freedom to use any appropriate approach to solve problems
• Personalised career development in both technical and non-technical skills, backed by both regular (weekly 1-1s, bi-weekly sprints, bi-monthly work goal setting, bi-annual performance review) and ad-hoc feedback
• A supportive and inclusive culture; bi-monthly Brighton retreats, monthly gatherings, weekly office meals, and impromptu BBQ / hot pot / dumpling hangouts that are always vegan friendly
• A strong in-person culture centred in our London office, with flexibility to work remotely
• Substantial equity compensation (0.5%-1.5%) and market-comparable cash compensation (£55k-£65k p.a.)

Responsibilities

Above all else, we value people who have a growth mindset and who want to make an impact in their work. We have listed below some thoughts on the responsibilities that an ideal candidate will grow into, and we don't expect you to be experienced in all the below before applying / joining.

If in doubt, reach out to us!

• Solve tough problems with design thinking & user interfaces
  • Identify, articulate, prioritise, and address customer pain points
  • Break down challenging problems into simple & well-designed solutions
  • Apply design thinking to solve real world problems
  • Be fact-driven and measure the real impact of your work
• Build products and make real-world impact
  • Own the end-to-end deployment of user interfaces — from ideation to development to deployment to improvement
  • Measure the impact of your work both qualitatively (user research, customer visits) and quantitatively (analytics) to proactively identify areas of improvement
  • Ship frequently, iteratively, and collaboratively; tradeoff MVPs and customer impact with perfectly engineered systems
  • Implement scalable infrastructure and processes, e.g., test, experiment, monitor
  • Choose the best framework / technology for the task, even if you might have favourites. We work primarily in NextJS / React / Typescript / Vercel / Tailwind CSS on the frontend, and Python / Flask / FastAPI / GCP for ML & backend, but we always experiment with what enables the greatest performance and delivers the most value
• Work in an fast-paced, high-growth, team-based environment
  • Be entrepreneurial. This means having a growth mindset, finding problems without being told about them, thinking independently about issues and clearly advocating your position, and taking full ownership of your work, even if things go wrong
  • Be a team player. You value diversity & inclusion in the workplace, are a helpful teammate, and understand best practices for building products as part of a team e.g., code review / version control
  • Each of our five team members was born on a different continent. Applicants from any location, background, and gender are welcome and we have a zero tolerance policy on discrimination