Software Engineer

Software Engineer

We are Lick

Lick is a people-powered decorating movement. We are a force for change in the home decor space, with a vision to transform the industry for our community of decorators and for the planet. Our ambition is to be the definitive decorating partner – for advice and support, inspiration and products.

We believe it all starts with confidence. Confidence to find your own interior style, confidence to choose the perfect colours, confidence to know which tools you need, confidence to get decorating.

It's why we curate a selection of paints, wallpapers and blinds which means they don’t come in all the colours but THE colours. It's why we have an expert team of colour consultants on-hand to help with any decorating question, big or small. It's why we're building a supportive community of decorators to inspire each other with their projects.

About the Company

The home decor brand was founded in 2019 by Lucas London and Sam Bradley - both experienced startup entrepreneurs - targeting the $1trillon global home decor market. The business has raised over $29m since inception. OMERS Ventures lead our Series A round in June 2021 with participation from existing investors Felix Capital and contributions from entrepreneurs and PE investors including Magnus Rausing, Alex Chesterman and Kathaka, the family office of Caroline Rupert of Richemont. Our sights are set on scale, this means expanding our product offering, launching new sustainability initiatives, and growing our already thriving community of home decorators across the globe.

• Check out The Times coverage of our Series A investment round
• Get the headlines from our record breaking £1M Decorator powered crowd funding campaign
• Read some home decor industry press coverage
• MOST IMPORTANTLY read what our decorators have to say on our Google page.

Lick is an online home decor brand with a focus on sustainable, industry-leading community building. Check out our amazing community on Instagram and Facebook Group.

We believe that a simple change in design can have a massive impact on the way we feel about the spaces we spend our lives in. We think the customer journey for interior decorating is broken and we don't just want to fix it, we want to become the leading brand in this space, because our decorators know everything we do is driven by their insights and our expertise combined.

Our Office

We moved into our beautiful sunny, airy office space 🏠 a few days before lockdown. We now work with a remote-first approach, and we tend to use the office as needed. If you do use the office, there are fresh coffee, snacks and refreshments, and also a beautiful park just 2 minutes from our front door for a walk for lots of fresh air and hopefully sunshine ☀️.

We are only 5 minutes walk🚶 away from Vauxhall station with easy access by train, tube, bus or bicycle. There are lots of secure spaces for you to store a bicycle/shower/change as needed.

Sustainability at Lick

Reducing our environmental impact is at the forefront of what we do and how we do it

We’re constantly finding ourselves on the lookout for ways to lower our impact on the planet and create a better future for our kids. We're committed to making that happen across everything that we do.

Our Culture

Just over one year old, our culture will continue to evolve like everything we do. To give you a sense of what to expect, we can confirm it's fast and are very ambitious, with high expectations. We believe a great team can do great things and we work hard to ensure you have what you need to thrive and make a real impact. We put a huge emphasis on information sharing, communications and relationships. We use data and customer insights to improve what we do and how we do it.

With customers and creativity at our core, we have a LOT of fun at Lick. Everyone at Lick is a colour specialist and of course we offer all team members paint, training and supplies too.

About The Role

With huge early traction, we are in the process of significant investment into our technology team lead by our newly appointed Chief Technology Officer, Simon Lockyer, and our Principle Engineer, Joel Pierre-Powell, we are a small diverse team that is rapidly scaling. The investment is focused on building a world class technology team that will push the boundaries of what is possible in e-commerce.

We are looking for a full time, highly-skilled Senior Software Engineer, to help build out our core technical product offerings. Reporting directly to our Principle Software Engineer, you will be executing our ambitious roadmap and redefining the future of the home decor space.

This role will give you the opportunity to build both internal and external products. Every day is different, as we continue to build out our user experience, super charge our event driven architecture and prepare for launching internationally as well as helping with optimising internal operations. We would love to hear from you if you are passionate about best practice methodologies, cutting-edge technology and funnel optimisation.

Our Tech Stack

We currently have a mono repo driven by Lerna for all our applications. Our front end application is built using NextJS, we also utilise TypeScript, React, Styled Components and our API is built on ExpressJS. To supercharge our system we leverage serverless functions with event queues to drive all our integrations. This is all supported by AWS, Terraform and CircleCI.

To maintain quality throughout our applications we employ the use of Jest and React Testing Library for our unit testing. We are also building out our functional testing framework with Cypress.

The heart of our technology is our E-commerce layer, built upon Shopify's headless StoreFront API and GraphCMSs headless CMS API. To maintain quality and showcase our work we use Storybook to build out our UI components using atomic design principles.

Responsibilities

• You will assist in the code management process all through QA, UAT, versioning, deployment and consistently audit and refactor this code to ensure stability and improve performance
• You will be a contributor to our codebase and and consistently assist in the software process through QA, UAT, versioning, deployment
• Core contributor in delivering projects and KPIs on-time. Writing high-quality, well-tested code and delivering features, autonomously, seeing projects through to completion
• Develop new features and improve existing ones, considering all users in the process, whether they be internal (e.g content or operations teams) or consumers
• Work closely with product and UX/UI to ensure requirements are met from a user experience and technical point of view
• Ensure we are fostering an environment of discovery and innovation, contributing to evolving what we do and ensuring it is best in class
• Contribute to architectural decisions as it relates to the current task and wider impact on the scalability of the applications we build
• Help design, execute and scale our event-driven micro services architecture
• Take ownership in the tools and technology we use as a company with our Principle Engineer
• Guide and mentor more junior members of the software engineering team
• Ensure quality is maintained across all our technology systems
• Ensure all important technical decisions are documented and shared across the department

The experience we are looking for:

• Bachelor's Degree (or above) in Computer Science/Maths/Physics/similar, or equivalent real world experience and platforms using JavaScript and/or Typescript
• Experience with delivering scalable, distributed, cloud-based systems in a highly available manner
• Solid understanding of JavaScript including NodeJS
• Familiar with functional programming
• Strong understanding of different software engineering practices, infrastructure, and how each can help deliver more value to users
• Previous experience in other startups (bonus)
• Experience/Familiar with atomic design patterns
• Experience using JIRA, Asana, or equivalent work-flow tools

Qualities Required:

• Comfortable in a fast-paced, start-up environment, as well as collaborating with a remote software engineering team
• You have a continuous improvement mindset, constantly seeking to reduce waste and avoid re-work
• You are a self-driven engineer, experienced with working independently, but can also work as a part of a team
• You love to learn and are results driven
• You care about your end users whether they be internal or external
• Excellent communication and organisational skills
• You are passionate about clean and appropriately tested code
• Strong analytical and critical thinking

Benefits

• Competitive salary and opportunity to earn equity options grants
• You’ll get first-hand experience being part of and growing with a high growth, super early stage, fast moving, and ambitious company
• 26 days holiday (including your birthday off) + bank holidays, with a relaxed approach
• Generous allowance for Lick products
• Relaxed work from home policy / use the office when/if you like
• A growth focused team, you will enjoy our monthly Expert Knowledge Shares and bespoke interior design training programs
• Contribute to building and scaling a culture where wellbeing is part of how we do things, not just a bonus
• A proactive approach to creating a working environment that supports/reflects our team member's unique personal need