Software Engineer, Backend - (UK - Remote)

At a glance

Ex-Y Combinator, profitable and funded startup of ~40 people. Remote team, mainly based in the UK. Creating a web-based platform for behavioural research. 4x yearly growth, all driven by word-of-mouth.

Python, Django, MongoDB, Google Cloud Platform. No prior knowledge required.

You: Experienced backend or full stack engineer with an interest in product.

£50-90k depending on skills and experience.

The Company

At Prolific, we're changing how research on the internet is done. Our co-founders Katia and Phelim started by building a marketplace that connects researchers from both Academia and industry with instant, high quality, global research participants. Now, as a growing team, our bigger vision is to build the most powerful and trusted platform for behavioral research.

We were in Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch, we've recently closed a $1.4M seed round, we've been growing 4x a year purely through word-of-mouth, we're already profitable, and we have very ambitious plans.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced backend developer. In the role you will play a key part in developing and guiding our product. You should have broad practical knowledge in different areas of software development. We're looking for a developer whose existing skills, experience, and knowledge will complement and support our growing team. As we’re an early stage startup you’ll have the opportunity to significantly influence the trajectory of our products.

Our core product is a single page vue.js application with a Python backend. We use CircleCI for continuous integration and write a lot of tests. You aren't expected to be familiar with all of these technologies and will have the time and support to develop your skills and understanding on the job.

What you will be Doing

• Building and maintaining applications primarily written in Python and Django.
• Collaborating with a multi-disciplined team, including front-end engineers, product managers, and researchers.
• Writing unit and integration tests for your code - we have a strong testing culture.
• Improving our existing systems so that they can scale as we grow.
• Sharing best practices to improve our products and processes.
• Assisting the customer support team.
• Designing the architecture of new services as part of a team.

How we Operate

Our engineers are split into small multi-discipline squads of 3-7 people (engineers, product designers, UX, product managers). Squads are problem-focused and work on high level objectives, e.g. our Impact Squad is looking at ways the site’s UX can be improved to increase retention of users. Squads use 6-12 week cycles to meet the objectives with continuous delivery throughout the cycle.

We have a strong belief in the value of testing - both integration and unit testing. All code goes through code review.

Deep work is valued throughout the company. We favour async communication over Slack and Notion. When we need to communicate in real-time we try to group meetings together to give everyone bigger blocks of interruption-free time.

Our problem-focused squads allow for regular innovation, which we foster further with quarterly hack-days, building things like study debriefing tools and experiments comparing our platform to competitors like MTurk.

Continuous learning and development is strongly encouraged. Everyone gets a personal development budget which they can put towards things like books, courses and conferences, and reserve times every fortnight for learning new things or working on creative side-projects.

We’re aware of the challenges of being a remote worker and work hard to foster team-spirit. We encourage remote chats over coffee with colleagues and have regular team meetings to keep everyone up to date with goings on across the company and introduce new joiners.

We believe that we are in the process of successfully building a company that people enjoy working for. Our employees should feel valued, supported, and fulfilled. We know that there’s always more that we could be doing and have regular conversations about what we can improve. Everyone’s opinion is important and all input is taken on board.

Requirements

• An interest in shipping products that make an impact on users’ lives.
• Ability to write clean and maintainable code in a modern language (Python, Ruby, Java, Scala, Node, etc). We can teach you Python if needed.
• Experience of building web applications or platforms.
• Familiarity with testing and continuous delivery practices.

What We Offer

• Competitive salaries - £50-90k depending on skills and experience.
• Meaningful share option allocation.
• £3,000 equipment budget that can be spent on laptop, peripherals and furniture if needed (e.g. standing desks).
• Flexible hours: We have core hours of 9:30am - 3pm (with an hour for lunch), but the rest is up to you.
• Childcare flexibility: Need to pick your child up from school? No problem.
• 25 days holiday per year, plus bank holidays (which you can switch with your religious holiday if preferred).
• Budget for education, growth, and training.
• Personal growth opportunities and career progression (e.g. learning about the startup ecosystem; mentoring from the executive team; gaining insight into psychological science and research methods).
• Personal carbon offsettings via Mossy Earth.
• Generous maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave.

The Interview Process

Our aim is to get to know how you’d fit into our team as a backend developer. First we’ll have a short call with you to discuss your career to date and your motivations for the role. Then we’ll give you a backend task that is relevant to the work we do at Prolific. We don’t expect you to spend more than three hours on this. We understand that your time is valuable so you will be reimbursed with a £50 Amazon voucher, regardless of whether or not you proceed to the final round. The final stage will be interviews with the co-founders and another member of the development team, where we will dig deeper into your values and technical understanding.