Ruby Software Engineer

Bloom & Wild is re-inventing the $60B global flower industry. Over a billion flower exchanges take place every year and industry satisfaction levels are low. Driven by our vision of creating the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful, we do things differently. From inventing letterbox flowers to founding The Thoughtful Marketing Movement. And we’ve seen impressive traction to date - we are Europe’s leading online flower company, and the UK’s fastest growing ecommerce company according to the Financial Times, growing at +100%.

In January 2021, we announced our £75 million Series D funding round, led by General Catalyst (backers of Airbnb and Deliveroo), alongside other top tier investors including Index Ventures (investors in Wise and Glossier). We are home to a family of 3 strong brands, Bloom & Wild, Bloomon and Bergamotte, having acquired Bloomon in April 2021 and Bergamotte in July 2021. Together, we are active in 8 countries. 

We have been named one of the 5 fastest growing tech companies in Europe and are alumni of Tech Nation’s Future Fifty. We were also one of the Sunday Times Top 100 Small Companies to Work For 2020.

We really care about creating a diverse and inclusive team and we welcome people from all backgrounds, with different perspectives, ideas and experiences to work with us. In our team, everyone has the freedom to give their opinion, grow in their career and be part of a genuinely caring and inclusive team.

Technology Team at Bloom & Wild

There are over 60 people in the Technology team at Bloom & Wild, who work from a variety of locations across Europe, in our remote friendly model. We’re made up of the Engineering team, Platform Operations & IT, and Architecture teams, with Engineering being organised into cross functional squads, each responsible for, and with the autonomy to own, a business and architectural domain.

Technology lies at the heart of what we do, powering our business growth, and our squads,  led by an Engineering Manager and a Product Manager, are the engines that power our Engineering team. 

The Checkout & Payments Squad

The Checkout & Payments squad is a close-knit, cross functional, team who help to ensure that our customers have a great purchase experience across our gifting and subscription ranges. This means focusing on important metrics like conversion and churn rate, and owning critical areas of our website such as the checkout funnel, payment service provider integrations and order confirmation pages. We’ve got exciting challenges ahead as we evolve the checkout experience to suit the increasingly varied needs of our rapidly growing business and customer base and continue our broader strategy to break up our platform into a set of smaller services and consolidate onto a single microservices platform.

You can read more about our technology and culture over on our tech blog - Code & Wild.

The role and ways of working:

You’ll play a part in delivering both your squad's roadmap. This will mean writing, reviewing and supporting code in our platform, taking ideas from requirements to production code, and being responsible for quality at every step along the way. You’ll work with some great technology. Our backend platform, currently using Ruby 2.6.5 and Rails 6 is backed by PostgreSQL, Fargate/ECS on AWS, with APIs that are used by our Angular 12 webapp and our native mobile apps. Our technology strategy also includes continuing to develop new domain driven services & microservices. You will get to work with, and learn from, an established and experienced group of Ruby engineers from across the Engineering team, who will support you and encourage you to grow and fulfil your potential.

As a Ruby developer (2 years+), you’ll:

Have demonstrable knowledge of Ruby on Rails in a production environment and experience of test-driven development.  Be familiar with good CI/CD and observability practices. Have some experience of distributed service architectures, including how best to test and release them, and how to ensure system stability when making changes independent of other services. Have worked with RESTful APIs and ideally you will have built new ones,  Have used version control tools such as GitHub, CI/CD tools, and testing tools like RSpec/Cucumber or similar. Be able to get going quickly, working with others to understand complex systems and also be able to communicate with non-technical team members. Experience working in a fast-growing (preferably consumer-facing) start-up. Experience working on an e-commerce site.

Why Bloom & Wild?

To care wildly for our customers, first 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.

🌻 Work that works for you 

- Flexible working (core hours from 10-4pm)

- Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year 

- Summer hours: every Friday afternoon off during July and August (trialling in 2023)

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

- Enhanced family leave policy and a workplace nursery scheme

- 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart

🌴 Time off

- 25 days’ holiday + your birthday and bank holidays each year

- Option to buy an extra 5 days’ holiday each year 

- Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar

🌱 Health & Wellbeing

- Health cash plan through Simplyhealth

- Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions

- Allies and champions groups

- Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers 

- In person and virtual yoga every week

- Cycle to work scheme

- Our office kitchen is stocked with healthy drinks and snacks to keep you going

- Financial wellbeing support through Bippit

- Workplace pension contributions

🌳 Growth & Development

- A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme

- Access to the Goodhabitz learning platform

- Mentee and mentor opportunities with our external partners, such as The Women's Association and Future Founders

- Internal & external  Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics. 

💐 Moments that matter

- Social & wellbeing monthly calendar

- We love to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones!

- Summer and End of Year events,, team lunches and post-peak celebrations

- Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!

Our Hiring Process

We are continuing to conduct the majority of our interview processes remotely via video. This will involve an initial chat with our TA team followed but a call with the Engineering Manager. You'll then be invited to complete a take home technical exercise. Followed by a technical interview and the opportunity to meet some of the software engineers that you’d work with, and final round will be with the Engineering Manager & Senior Product Manager together.

Your application experience is important to us and we’re keen to adapt to make every interaction even better. We welcome feedback on our recruitment process and would love to hear from you directly on how we can improve. If you have any suggestions please feel free to let us know.