Senior Backend Java Developer

About us

Food waste is a $1 trillion problem – costing the world over 1% of global GDP. We’re dead set on solving the problem and looking for people to help us achieve our mission. We, at Winnow, believe that food is far too valuable to waste, and that technology can transform the way we produce food. Our team is made of people who all share a passion for food and technology.

Winnow was founded in London in 2013 to help the hospitality industry prevent food waste through internet of things tools in the kitchen. We have worked with hundreds of sites and are operating in over 60 countries around the world supported by our offices in London, Dubai, Singapore, Romania and North America. We are a rapidly growing company with a strong base of clients who are rolling out our system globally. We have blue-chip customers including Accor Hotels, IKEA, IHG, Marriott, Compass Group and many others.

Winnow’s clients on average reduce waste by over 50% by value and sustain savings. Winnow has now worked with hundreds of sites to reduce food waste, including hotels, universities and schools, staff restaurants, event/hospitality kitchens, buffets, pubs, and high street restaurants. Where the system is permanently adopted, pre-consumer waste value is reduced by 50% - 70% with no detrimental impact to the perceived quality or value of the offer to their customers. This represents a typical improvement of food cost savings of 3% to 8%, commonly a 40%+ increase in profitability for operations.

As the global leader in addressing food waste, we are committed to continue pushing the envelope on what technology can do to solve this problem. Winnow Vision, our new artificial intelligence-based technology, is trained to automatically track all food waste thrown away. It has won awards at the World Economic Forum and has received tremendous enthusiasm from our clients and the industry. You can read more about it on our website and this article in Forbes.

Other recent accolades saw Winnow awarded a winner of Impact 50's most impactful companies to work for, as well as included in the Top 30 Best Small and Medium companies to work for in 2023 by undelucram.ro.

About the role

Our team is responsible for building tools used by our customers and Winnow teams to manage the food waste tracking activities, and present high-quality, clear, actionable insights about what is wasted and how can it be reduced.

Developing such a product involves many different concerns and teams: creating solutions that work well in a busy kitchen environment, scalable and flexible cloud systems, managing large amounts of data, and exposing it to customers.

We are looking for a talented senior software engineer to join our team and help us in this mission. With front-line exposure to our systems, you will have the opportunity to expand / enrich your knowledge in this exciting and cutting edge arena.

We use a wide variety of technologies to solve the complex problems we are facing. Our favourite candidates are developers that follow best practices in any programming language, who use the best tool for the job and can adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

Key responsibilities

This role will sit within our Hub or Insights development teams, working on internal and customer facing tooling and analytical applications.

You will be expected to be involved with all aspects of software delivery:

• Creating technical designs

• Writing reusable, testable, and efficient code
• Implementing automated tests
• Developing CI/CD pipelines
• Deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the production system

You will be working as part of a best in class product and engineering team, delivering cutting edge software solutions.

Our Technology

Our current technology stack is outlined below:

• Java 17
• Spring Boot, Apache Camel
• PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS Redshift
• VueJS
• REST APIs
• Microservice-style, event-driven cloud architecture
• Kafka, MQTT
• Docker for both our cloud and edge-device applications
• AWS
• IoT ‘smart’ edge devices (Android tablets / Nvidia TX2)
• Linux-based embedded OS on our Edge devices
• Continuous Integration and Delivery using Jenkins, SonarQube
• Terraform, NewRelic for infrastructure management
• In the company we also use: Python, Go, Android apps (Kotlin), Mode Analytics, Pentaho / Saiku, Serverless functions

Requirements

• You should have a good understanding of the Java programming language and developing webservices which you will have gained in your professional working career
• You have a deep understanding and good experience of relational databases and SQL queries (ideally PostgreSQL)
• Your primary focus will be developing our server-side software (mostly Java using Kafka or REST APIs) but able to help out with other technologies (e.g. Python, Go, VueJS) when necessary
• You should be comfortable with using Linux terminal environments
• Understanding of programming (not just using frameworks, extensions and plugins but understanding what they do, how they work and if needed build/extend them)
• Understanding of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Unit and Integration Testing
• Experience working with tools like JIRA and Confluence
• Basic understanding of front-end technologies
• Experience with the development of a major project/product hosted in AWS is a plus
• Having interest to learn and work with other tools and languages, such as Python (preferred) and Go is a plus
• Using Jenkins as the CI tool is a plus

Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Company stock options package
• Meal tickets - 30 Ron per working day
• Subsidised health insurance
• We finish work on Fridays at 3pm in every Winnow office around the globe
• 2 Wellness hours per month plus a 137 RON gross monthly wellness allowance or the option to swop the wellness allowance for a 7Card subscription
• Employee Assistance Programme - 24/7 helpline for your wellbeing
• 25 days of paid vacation time in addition to national holidays
• Shared office space with a great working environment and a flexible approach to work
• You will love what you do – waking up every day solving one of the biggest social problems of our generation
• Committed team members with broad experience who share a common passion to build a world class business