Senior Full-stack .NET Software Engineer

tl,dr;

• Ooooby is an impact enterprise focused on building a shop and logistics platform for small-scale farms and food producers.
• We are a small team of 10 people, operational for over 10 years with investment in the UK.
• Seeking an experienced senior full-stack engineer with strong back-end expertise.
• Must be proficient in .NET (currently using .NET 6), MVC/Razor, and ideally React/Next.js.
• Good at writing extensible, readable, testable, and performant code.
• Pragmatic and customer-focused approach to business decisions.
• Excellent communication skills and willingness to voice opinions.
• We are offering a salary of £70 - 90k per annum with flexible working hours.
• Fully remote work environment with in-person get togethers a few times per year.
• We are developing a way to share in the company’s success in the future.
• Involvement in meaningful work supporting small, ecologically-sound food producers.

About us

Ooooby stands for “out of our own backyards”. We are an impact enterprise with a mission to put ‘small-scale’ back at the heart of the food system. We provide an online shop and backend system for small-scale farmers with a heavy focus on fresh food logistics. Our platform manages orders, payments, logistics, planning, and much more. This makes it easier for small food producers to sell direct to their customers, make a living and contribute to our mission.

We’re a small and passionate team of ten, spread across the UK and Netherlands. Many of us have worked in small-scale food previously (although this isn’t a requirement), and some of us are active customers on our own platform, running small farms or food aggregation stores. We get together in person about twice a year to hang out, talk strategy, eat good food, and get to know each other. We have received investment from a number of impact-investment funds, have doubled our customer base in the last 12 months, and are preparing for an equity raise.

You will be working most closely with me - Davy - and our team of 3 other engineers. I built the existing Ooooby platform, and have been involved with Ooooby since 2011. My prior experience includes working as an Engineer and Director of Engineering at Xero. I value autonomy, transparency, and healthy discussion in a team, so that we can work closely together to do amazing work. I’ll be treating you as an equal, not just a report, and I’ll be relying on you to hold me to account just as much as I’ll do the same with you.

Role description

You are most comfortable in back-end development, building out APIs, well tested business logic, tuning SQL, with an understanding of good software architecture. You know about DevOps, monitoring, and good security practices. You might have a little experience in the front-end, perhaps a little React / NextJS or older frameworks like MVC/Razor or similar, and can build at least a first pass of a UI by following existing patterns. You’ll use your experience to help ensure our codebase is extensible, testable, scalable, and other “-ables” (i.e. you’re always considering our NFRs).

As a small company, we’re constantly making prioritization decisions between feature work, speed to market, scalability, modernisation, engineering excellence, short- vs long-term planning, etc. You will be involved in discussions about all functions of the business, and we’ll expect you to bring your engineering and design experience to the table to talk about pragmatic solutions with non-technical team members, while ensuring we build a robust, sustainable product to market.

You will be responsible for working on a range of product initiatives, spanning public-facing e-commerce to admin-facing support tools, within a predominantly Microsoft environment with a React/NextJS front-end for some components and a MVC/Razor front-end for others. While initial work will be on the React FE, you must be willing and capable of working across both of these technologies.

Responsibilities

1. Develop high-quality software solutions using .NET (+ MVC), MS SQL, React, NextJS, and other suitable technologies.
2. Collaborate constructively with other team members including engineers, sales and customer support to understand customer needs and translate them into software solutions.
3. Participate in code and design reviews, providing constructive feedback to team members.
4. Maintain and improve the performance, stability, and scalability of our applications.
5. Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies, applying new learnings to improve our software and processes.

Requirements

Must haves

1. Significant experience in software development, with demonstrated success in building quality software solutions to solve a variety of technical and business problems.
2. Strong experience in .NET (we’re using .NET 6) with MS SQL, building APIs and well-tested business logic.
3. A good general understanding of all aspects of web software development - from DNS to CSS, CI/CD to security, testing to architecture.
4. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, not afraid to ask questions or challenge others constructively and respectfully.

Should haves

1. Strong product awareness and customer-focused mindset, with the ability to participate in discussions on customer needs, product strategy and product roadmap.
2. A dedicated work space for remote working, as well as an appreciation of the trade offs that happen in remote vs in-person work environments.

Nice to haves

1. Experience in startup products, understanding the tradeoffs between getting to market fast vs building things right.
2. Interest and knowledge about design research, experimentation, and data-driven analysis to help inform decision making.
3. An interest in building a better food system and resonance with our mission.

What we can offer you

In the UK we can offer £70 - 90k p.a. for the right senior candidate. For other markets we will find a comparable salary bracket based on local job data. We have flexible working hours and are fully remote.

We are also developing a Steward-Ownership model for the company, which aims to align our ownership structure with our social purpose, while providing opportunities for employee ownership (among other goals). While we won’t have specifics ready for a start date, this is a pledge we have made publicly and you’ll be consulted on how this comes together, and how you can share in the success of the company.

As a very small company, you will get insight and involvement across many business functions. If you want exposure to an entire company’s operations (with the ability to make a large impact along the way), we can provide significant learning opportunities. This is a great stepping stone to starting your own business, or just being a big part of something that’s growing.

Of course we also hope that our mission resonates with you and that you’ll get a sense of purpose at work by building something for good, as well as seeing first hand the impact your contributions can have on small, independent, and ecologically-sound food producers.

Application Process

As an early-stage member of our team, you will have a massive impact on our success and culture, so it’s important we make sure that you’re right for Ooooby, and that Ooooby is right for you. We recognise that job hunting can be a time consuming process - we will let you know early if we decide not to proceed to the following stage so that we don’t waste your time. 

Our planned process looks like this;

1. Applications. Please send in your CV and a cover letter explaining how you meet our requirements, and what is important for you when joining a company.
2. Written interview. We will send through a short questionnaire of about 5 questions, which we hope you can answer in 10 - 30 minutes.
3. Stage 1 interview. A 20 minute conversation about tech, culture, and values. For you: We will outline our product and our team.
4. Stage 2 interview. A 1 hour high-level technical / product interview. Topics such as: what good engineering looks like, how to balance priorities, how you might approach certain problems, etc. For you: We will give you information about our current tech, our product plans, and the sorts of things you might be working on in the first few months.
5. Stage 3 interview. A 1.5 hour detailed technical interview. Hands on coding exercises in the front end and back end. For you: We can talk more about our engineering roadmap, what engineering looks like with us, and our ways of working. We’ll probably have an idea of where in our suggested salary range you might sit, so we can talk about that too.
6. Stage 4 interview. A 1 hour cultural and team fit conversation. For you: Meet some of the team, get to know the people you could be working with.

You should apply for the role through LinkedIn.

At Ooooby, we welcome and encourage applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of race, gender, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or any other aspect that makes you unique. Together, we can create a more inclusive and equitable workplace.