Lead Data Engineer
Technology. Award-winning customer service. Bleeding-edge data ability.
Simply Business is a new type of insurance company, using all of the above to create the best possible insurance experience for small businesses and self-employed people.
We love working here, and have even taken the number one spot in the Sunday Times Best Company To Work For 2015 and 16 lists; we’ve stopped entering now to focus on a few bigger projects, but you get the idea.
It’s a great place towork.
There are currently over 500,000 active Simply Business insurance policies in the UK alone. And we have offices in London, Northampton and Boston,USA.
Talking of offices, ours are bright, airy and geared up for really smart working. We’re flexible, with plenty of remote workers coming in and out, and we believe work and life should be hand in hand, rather than a juggling act. So no need to worry about school pick-ups, or a horrible commute.
Our people are our most important asset, so we focus on building a working life that helps us thrive, not stick. Join us and you’ll be part of our journey to creating something even better, for our customers and ourselves.
We need a Lead Data Engineer to join us in London.
As a team we’re responsible for empowering and inspiring the company to create value through data. The Connected CRM and Marketing team play a key role in achieving this aim, creating tools to attract new customers and improve our communications with them.
As a Lead Data Engineer you’ll:
- Mentor team members, helping them develop their careers
- Help run the team alongside the Product Manager
- Shape the vision and architecture of the communications platform
- Be hands-on, designing, developing, and maintaining our systems
Responsibilities include:
- Developing a team where everyone feels engaged and challenged
- Proactively coaching, pairing with, and mentoring team members
- Ensuring that production systems are stable and scalable
- Proactively collaborating and communicating with your colleagues in the UK and abroad
- Highlighting areas for continuous improvement and driving their prioritisation
- Championing data thinking while creating useful systems for our customers in a collaborative way
- Being hands-on in developing our products, using best practices, appropriate tools, and technologies
What we’re looking for:
- Interest and experience in shaping and developing high-performance teams
- A strong desire to work collaboratively with business-focused teams – we don’t divide ‘business’ and ‘tech’ teams as we’re all working towards one shared goal
- Experience working in distributed teams, and strong interpersonal skills to work well in our open and friendly environment
- Strong Scala or Java programming and architectural skills
- Experience using streaming technologies like Kafka and Kafka Streams
- An understanding and appreciation of Agile and Lean methodologies
- Proactivity in suggesting new tools, processes, and technologies to help us continually improve
- Experience with marketing and communications platforms (desirable)
We want to meet you
At Simply Business, we pride ourselves on having a diverse workforce. Unfortunately, research has shown that some candidates, particularly women and people from other underrepresented groups, are put off applying for a job if they don’t fit every single one of the criteria.
But hiring at Simply Business isn’t a box ticking exercise – we’re much more interested in meeting people who’re excited to work with us. So if this job appeals to you and you think you’d be a good fit, send us your CV. With any luck we’ll be seeing you at interview soon.
What are the benefits?
There’s all the serious (but important) stuff we call ‘core benefits’. On top of that, you can pick and choose from the more exciting options we offer – whether it’s a full gym membership or gym subsidy, comprehensive private health cover, extra holiday, or a National Trust pass.
The ‘core’ stuff
Some of these will kick in once you’re confirmed in post, but here’s the summary:
• a salary that reflects your experience, our pay policy and the market we’re in from your first day, generous annual leave
• life assurance (financial cover for your family, should the worst happen)
• a cash plan to reimburse your everyday medical expenses
• an extra day off if you get married or move house
• an automatic enrollment pension (employer-matched at 5%)
The fun stuff
Passed probation? Time to pick and mix from things like:
• a full gym membership
• private medical insurance
• extra days annual leave
• shopping vouchers
• dental insurance
• travel insurance
But there’s so much more to Simply Business than insurance and memberships. We also commit to flexible working options, smart working (our offices are kitted out for you to work when and how you choose), cycle to work, eye test vouchers, and season ticket loan schemes, and we have a handy online form to put in any training or conference requests.
Best of all, though, are the groups, clubs, and adventures that come with the Simply Business territory. Forget a simple Give As You Earn scheme (although we’ve got that too) – we trek the Sahara for charity, take you on weekends away, throw epic summer parties, and meet up for book groups, public speaking coaching, yoga, manicures, beer brewing, and lots, lots more.
Our values
Everything we do comes down to these five values – empowerment, authenticity, simplicity, learning and pioneering.
In practice, these will mean something unique to every person at Simply Business, but if you’re considering working here, give them some thought. They’re at the heart of our story.
Empowerment
We believe in our people and the positive impact they can have so we enable everyone to stretchthemselves
Authenticity
We celebrate diversity, avoid jargon and genuinely care about helping small businesses thrive
Simplicity
We attempt to simplify complex solutions to save our customerstime andeffort
Learning
We’re never done learning about new possibilities and act to explore them
Pioneering
We’re obsessed with finding new ways to create even better experiences