Backend Developer

Job Description

Posted 11 months ago

At Highstreet Mobile, our mission is to deliver the world’s best shopping experience with beautifully designed apps for global fashion and lifestyle brands. We’re currently serving over 30 apps for Android and iOS and support most of the biggest e-commerce platforms.

We are looking for an experienced Ruby developer to join our backend team. In this team, you will be working on the beating heart of our product, the Highstreet API. All code is written with a platform mindset: it should allow for customer-specific tailoring while offering a consistently great end-user experience.

You’ll join a team currently consisting of two experienced developers and a lead, so there’s plenty of room to make an impact: write quality code, have it undergo code review, ship it to production, track app reliability, and help others to do the same.

Although we still have a great office in Utrecht, The Netherlands, we’ve transitioned to becoming a remote-first company since the beginning of 2020. While a large part of our team is based in the Netherlands, we’ve got people working for us from all over Europe: we’re eight different nationalities, living in nine countries. And we put a lot of effort into making everyone feel at home. It’s up to you from where you’ll join us.

Our tech stack, how we work, and what you’ll work on

The Highstreet API is a REST-API written in Ruby using the Sinatra web framework, with a few outpost services written in Go. Because we integrate with many external services, we’re using Redis and Cassandra for our caching needs. We write our tests (mostly unit) in Minitest. Everything is deployed using Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform. We’re using Terraform to automate most of our infrastructure build-up and tear-down.

For this role, you must have experience building RESTful APIs and know what it’s like to create a service that interacts with many third-party systems. Prior experience with Go, Kubernetes, and/or Terraform is not required, and we will make sure there will be plenty of time to learn this when you need it.

Last year we started to use the Shape-Up methodology to develop our products. In short, this means you’ll work in a largely autonomous team together with mobile developers and designers in six-week cycles for focused work, followed by a two-week cooldown period which can be used to work on whatever you want. Because we work remotely, we have few recurring meetings, and instead, often communicate asynchronously. Of course, when we think it’s more efficient, we sometimes pull a few people together to discuss stuff in a call. (We like Tuple and Around.)

In your first month

Get up to speed with our tech stack and current projects

Meet everyone from design to sales to support to learn about their areas of expertise

Work on a small-batch project and have some code shipped to production

In your first 3 months

Feel comfortable in most of the essential parts of our backend codebase

Work autonomously on one or more big-batch projects

Review code by team members

Within your first 12 months

Know all the details of the backend codebase and how all parts interact with each other

Work together with our mobile developers on an RFC outlining a new API endpoint for our apps to use

Help set the technical direction of our platform to maintain scalability with more customers and more e-commerce platforms supported

Who are you?

You are a mid-level/senior developer, preferably experienced in Ruby

You have at least 3 years of professional experience in designing and building RESTful API’s

You like to take pride in the things you build

You have attention to detail: you write tests, think of edge-cases, and do not expect external services to always behave as documented

You enjoy learning new things and aren’t afraid to experiment and fail

You have really good writing skills

Benefits

Flourish in a culture of trust, ownership, and standard of excellence

Work remotely whenever you want

Possibility to work from our HQ at the heart of Utrecht (where delicious lunches are provided daily and we’ve got weekly team drinks on Friday)

Ability to work anywhere between 32-40 hours/week, on a flexible schedule

25 vacation days + 5 flex days

Competitive compensation package based on skills and experience.

Parental leave (2 weeks paid leave for partners)

We pay 70% of your pension plan

Yearly get-together, either by bringing all team members to a special destination or by flying remote team members to Utrecht (when this is possible again, of course)

You’ll be employed directly at Highstreet or through long-term contracting based on your location and personal preferences

Why you’ll love working with us

We are proud of our fantastic product and believe it has lots of potential. We are growing fast and have fun while building our platform and company. We try to foster a progressive and innovative environment with a lot of freedom and flexibility and give people a lot of trust and responsibility. Join us if you value a company where you can be yourself, work in a small team without corporate structures, and can contribute to a progressive working environment for everyone.