Staff Software Engineer

at  carwow

THE CARWOW GROUP

Carwow Group is driven by a passion for getting people into cars. But not just any car, the right car. That’s why we are building the go-to destination for car-changing. Designed to reach drivers everywhere with our trail-blazing portfolio of personality rich automotive brands; Carwow, Auto Express, evo, Driving Electric and Car Buyer.
What started as a simple reviews site, is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe - over 10m customers have used Carwow to help them buy and sell cars since its inception. Last year we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service.
In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia, doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with over 1.1 billion annual views, sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million.

THE ROLE

Staff engineers at Carwow will act like a paratrooper joining and working closely with existing cross-functional product teams, on a particularly challenging problem (a critical bug, a tough project) and being able to get productive immediately, working on unfamiliar codebase/area, different people or sometimes working in isolation. You will be sought after for your technical expertise and will be seen as a role model for Carwow.
You will work on cross-functional product teams consisting of product managers, engineers, designers and data analysts. You will work closely with a Product Manager and a Tech Lead on deciding what features to build for customers, break down and build features with the team, review code, mentor engineers, ensure operational excellence, and share knowledge broadly across the engineering organisation.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Working on big impact and highest priority piece of work for the company
• We love solving real-world problems!
• We work quickly, releasing code into production multiple times daily. You’ll see your code go live continuously.
• You’d be part of a growing team building a platform that will help define the future of car buying.
• We’re a curious bunch driven by a common goal of “How can we make it better?
• We work hard to ensure our people have the right level of autonomy, support and sense of purpose to really flourish in their careers.

Time spent in software engineering roles is of course important, but we prioritise attitude, aptitude, and the kind of impact you’ve had over years of experience. Ideally, you’ll have:

• Have worked as a senior software engineer with Ruby on Rails with a proven track record of delivering large projects
• Can write code that can be maintained – with good documentation, tests, and structure
• Experience with the following: TDD, Kafka, Git, JS, Heroku
• Have worked in a metrics-driven team and care about the outcomes of your work
• Are collaborative and motivated by achieving shared team goals and take responsibility for product outcomes
• Can contribute to high-level technical strategy and decision-making, identifying opportunities for innovation and improvement
• Have designed backend systems and APIs to a high standard of security, reliability and operability OR have experience building end-end websites
• Enjoy working in distributed teams and working cross-functionally with Product managers, designers, user researchers and other developers,
• Are keen to learn continuously, share knowledge, communicate effectively and build a product in close collaboration with other