Beam

Senior Full Stack Engineer (Ruby on Rails)

You're an experienced developer, passionate about social impact, looking to create the biggest positive impact of your career in an awesome team environment.

At Beam, our vision is to create a more just society by building radically better services and technology for those most in need.

We've already transformed the lives of hundreds of homeless people by supporting them through training, into rewarding work and stable homes.

We've done that by crowdfunding almost £2 million from over 10,000 supporters and building genuinely ground-breaking products.

We're a wildly ambitious team, backed by some of the world's leading tech investors and led by a hugely experienced, hands-on founding team.

We're a crew of friendly, collaborative problem-solvers who live by our core values of transparency and supporting each other.

We also get to do some fun things - like go to Downing Street :) 

And we're seriously just getting started. Read more about our company culture in Beam Life.

Life as a Developer at Beam

We're looking for someone to work closely with Julian (that's me, the guy who built Beam!) to help shape and build the future of our tools and products.

You and I would spend a lot of time pair programming, brainstorming hard problems, prototyping different ideas, throwing them away, and prototyping them again. You wouldn't be just churning through tickets in a backlog — you'd be helping to design entirely new products, figuring out what exactly we're even building and why.

You'd spend your time developing and improving existing projects, for example:

  • Building internal tools for our team to help as many people as efficiently as possible
  • An entirely new onboarding flow for our beneficiaries
  • Giving increased transparency to our supporters on the impact of their donations
  • Snazzy reporting products giving unprecedented insights for government customers
  • Optimising our products so that they are snappy and performant for all of our users

Check out this interview with one of Beam's Full Stack Engineers on the Beam blog.

What tech do we use?

Our priority is to ship maintainable, reliable systems. To date we've done that using:

  • Ruby on Rails on the back-end
  • Vue JS, Tailwind CSS and ERB for front-end
  • Heroku, AWS for hosting 
  • PostgreSQL for databases
  • RSpec, Sidekiq, Stripe, Twilio, Slack, Mailchimp

You should apply if 

  • You’re already a great Ruby developer, well versed in engineering best practices, including version control, test-driven development and continuous integration
  • You have at least 4+ years engineering experience in a high-growth tech startup or leading global tech company
  • You write clean, performant and well-documented code
  • You have experience building web products and services, and have an awareness of technologies across the stack
  • You care about building reliable, well-tested systems
  • You have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to make data-informed decisions
  • You have an entrepreneurial, get things done attitude 
  • You'll contribute to fostering a culture of psychological safety, inclusivity, collaboration and continuous improvement within the team through participation in retrospectives and feedback
  • You're passionate about social mobility 

We have a strong preference for London-based engineers who can regularly meet the team to problem solve in person. We do hire outside of the UK in locations within +/- 3 hours of GMT. 

What do you get for all your hard work?

  • £70-110k (dependent on experience - and for 10x engineers, we'll have an open discussion)
  • Additional EMI-qualifying share options in Beam
  • Mac or PC
  • Generous parental leave
  • Cycle Scheme
  • £500 ‘Be Amazing’ budget to spend on anything that’ll help you be amazing
  • 1:1 workplace coaching with More Happi
  • Plenty of Beam merch (obviously) and books aplenty
  • Perkbox perks - discounts and freebies at top brands
  • Hybrid set-up giving you significant flexibility plus the team bonding and fun of an awesome physical office in Shoreditch, once government rules permit it
  • Work-hard, play-hard culture with fortnightly socials in everything from candle and pizza making to treasure hunts
  • Annual team retreat (subject to social distancing rules)
  • Unlimited holiday policy
  • 'Beam Team Talks' - monthly talks to the team from pre-eminent figures in tech and other sectors. Speakers include the cofounders of JustGiving, Booking.com, Starling and Shazam.
  • Your own financial wellbeing coach, through Bippit

We will buy you any equipment you need to do your best work, including a new Mac, external display, office chair — whatever you need. If you need to rent a desk at a co-working space, we'll pay for that as well.

If you prefer to work part-time, we'll make this happen whenever we can - whether this is to help you meet other commitments or strike a great work-life balance

We work hard to make sure every employee is given the freedom, tools, trust, and support to do the best work of their careers.

All our interviews are currently conducted over Zoom. It usually takes us a week to get back to you after each round. Due to a high number of applications, we are unfortunately unable to offer feedback before Round 2. Feedback for subsequent rounds is provided if requested.

At Beam, we work hard to build diverse teams and believe diverse teams are the most impactful. We're especially excited to hear from BAME candidates or those with lived experience of social disadvantage. 

Good luck!