Changing the world of pet food for good

We’re Tails.com, a dog food subscription company with a big difference. We create truly tailored food for each and every dog we serve. We start by asking people a few simple questions about their dog. Then we use that information to create their dog’s unique Tails.com recipe – so their dog gets exactly the nutrition they need, in the taste they love, delivered to their door every month. It’s clever stuff.

We’ve got bold plans. Having created an entirely new category in pet food, we’re now scaling fast in the UK and Europe – backed by Purina, one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards the same goals – and a bunch of smart-ish dogs, all working on their own thing.

Together, we’ll change the world of pet food for good.

Software Engineering at Tails.com

We’re a 40+ strong, diverse team of software, cloud infrastructure and quality assurance engineers distributed across 6 squads, working across the customer-facing parts of tails.com as well as factory automation and fulfilment of tens of thousands of orders per day – in 9 countries.

The role

You’ll work in one of our autonomous squads made up of engineers, product managers, designers, and quality assurance. You’ll collaborate with teams to solve difficult problems across the entire company – from marketing and data to factory engineers. As Python is currently our main language, we prefer you to be already familiar with Python or any other web-oriented language (PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc).

In this position, you’ll get to:

• Work with a modern web stack and microservices to deliver features and products
• Lead best practices ensuring great software engineering and appropriate testing
• Contribute to the ongoing evolution of the platform architecture
• Participate in bi-monthly hackdays to build or learn absolutely anything you want
• Build software in an environment that supports your individual growth
• Ensure our customers have a healthy and happy dog for life!

The skills you’ll bring:

• Python 3 (plus Flask, Django or any other framework) or any comparable language, with web experience
• At least one SQL dialect
• Writing efficient and scalable code
• Running Docker locally and in production
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• Experience with Kubernetes, event systems (especially Kafka), scaling and running high-traffic software on AWS or GCP are nice to have
• Experience working with fulfilment systems is nice to have

We ship early and often, so we push multiple deployments live per day through our CI/CD pipelines. Our local development environments have setup guides and it’s possible to ship something on your very first day. We like to keep the code review process friendly and supportive so everyone can learn and grow. We also make space in our sprints for learning and development time, and hold in-house workshops on new technologies.

Our Commitment

We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are under-represented at Tails.com.

During your interview process, you’ll meet some of our team with varying levels of responsibility and experience. We want to give every candidate a fair interview process and if you need any reasonable adjustments made, please let us know.

What’s next?

If this sounds like it matches your experience and what you’d love to do, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you’re unsure whether you fit our criteria exactly, please get in touch anyway. And because we believe that diverse teams perform better, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an under-represented demographic.

Here’s a taster of how our recruitment process works:

• Once you have applied, the engineering team will review your CV (we screen CVs together in small groups to avoid biases).
• If selected, you will then have a call with someone in our software engineering team (30 mins).
• If successful, you will be sent a tech test.
• If successful, you will be invited to complete a 2.5 hour interview – 2x 1 hour interviews with peers and 1x 30 minute chat with our Director of Engineering.

What's in it for you?

• Competitive salary, reviewed annually
• Annual bonus, based on company performance
• Flexible core hours, giving you true work life balance
• Hybrid role to ensure this role works for you
• 25 days of holiday (excluding bank holidays) which increases over time to a max of 27 days
• 9/10 day working week to enhance your wellbeing without a reduction in pay and leave allowance
• Optional 5 days unpaid leave and 1 paid volunteer day each year
• When you need a change of scenery, you can work from abroad 2 weeks every 6 months
• A £2,500 budget to buy whatever development kit you need
• Health insurance for you, paid by Tails.com
• Extended maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption pay. 6 months at 70% pay
• Flexible paid care leave to support immediate dependants, people close to you and pets
• An external financial coach to support a range of topics – debt management, savings and investments
• In-house L&D team, with access to year round courses to help drive your development
• 50% discount on all Tails.com and 40% on Republic of Cats products
• Discounted gym membership