tl;dr: Cord — a way to make any product collaborative — is hiring for bootcamp grads to join our engineering team.
We’re looking for folks early in their career to take on entry level coding jobs. These roles will feature lots of mentorship as well as real, lands-in-production coding work. We know folks coming from coding bootcamps still have a lot to learn. We also know that bootcamp graduates bring a wealth of other skills, maturity, and perspective. The goal is to build a diverse and inclusive team of talented people. The best way we know to do this is to help up-and-coming tech folks find their footing.
At Cord, we’re a team of mostly senior folks. About half the team is ex-Facebook/Google/Oculus/Lyft/etc.. That’s pretty uncommon and it means we can support some talented, junior folks from atypical backgrounds. Maybe that’s you?
Your work will include a mix of:
- Expanding your technical knowledge and skills
- Learning industry-grade coding practices
- Working with senior engineer mentors
- Working alongside other bootcamp graduates who already work here!
- Contributing to features of our product
- Contributing to our APIs and SDKs
- Fixing bugs and solving user-facing problems
- Participating in product discussions
- Finding yourself across the stack and growing into mid-level and beyond
For this role, we’re not expecting coding competition aces or wunderkind, I-see-the-matrix savants. We’re looking for smart, hard-working, growth-oriented folks who are very early in their career. We will give you work at the level of challenge that you’re ready for as well as the support and mentorship to grow into bigger and more interesting challenges.
Tech Stack
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- Server-side NodeJS
- React
- AWS
- GraphQL
- Postgres
- WebSockets
Benefits
- Training sessions that pick up where bootcamps leave off
- Sessions on Git, React, TypeScript – literally everything you need to contribute meaningfully
- Mentorship from industry-veteran senior engineers
- Weekly tech talks (focusing on anything from atomic clock computing to how hiring works in tech)
- A blame-free culture where there are no stupid questions
- First-class, brand-new hardware (M1 Macbook Pro or whatever you prefer, 27” monitor, electric standing desk)
- You-need-it-you-get-it culture for things like books, online resources, courses
- Career advancement that matches what you’d get at the big techs
- Good pay (We’ve found our base salary for bootcamp grads is about £10K per year higher than most other companies hiring from bootcamps.)
- Private health insurance, pension plan, all that fun stuff
- Generous holiday and hybrid WFH-office culture
Requirements
We’re really truly not fussed how much experience you have. What we’re looking for is:
- Keen interest in gaining technical mastery in writing software and building products
- Willingness to jump in and learn from people who really know their stuff
- Literally everything else is secondary
Nice-to-Haves
- Idk… know any good jokes?
Real talk
So, it’s a bit awkward to mention it, but studies have shown again and again that with job descriptions like this, there are very clear gender-related reactions. The TL;DR is that men are much more likely to apply than women. The reason for this usually because women are more likely to assume they don’t meet the criteria. So, if you’re reading this and thinking you probably don’t meet the bar, please apply. This is a job for you.
Interview Process
Did you ever see that scene in Harry Potter where he’s on trial in the Ministry of Magic? So, our process isn’t like that. The process starts with a quick video call just to meet, check in, talk about the opportunity and your background. Very low-stress.
If that all works out, we’ll advance to a technical interview called a “code read”. This is different from traditional tech interviews. The Big Techs are all about the whiteboard coding interviews, but we don’t find they give us very meaningful signal about bootcamp graduates. We know folks coming from bootcamps aren’t usually ready to produce complex algorithms from their fingertips on demand. So, instead, we present you with some code and ask you to talk us through it. Show us what you see. Describe the code and how it works. As a junior engineer, you spend a lot of your time learning and reading how existing stuff works. So, we test for that in our process.
From there, if things go well, we’d bring you in for an interview day with us. This involves one interview focused on showing your breadth of knowledge by talking through a complex problem that has no tidy answers. This interview is an exploration with no right or wrong answers. We’ll also do a couple of lightweight technical interviews. In one, you’ll be asked to write some code, but in a much less high-pressure way than your average whiteboard coding interview. In another, you’ll be asked to talk through a piece of product UI and explain why it works like it does. The other interview you’ll do is a general “job interview” sort of interview. We know this is a long day, so we break it up with a free lunch on us (you tell us what you want and we’ll get it here) and a chance to meet some more of the team over the meal.
Afterwards, you’ll get a decision from us and the chance to get feedback about your interview performance.
If this sounds like an opportunity for you, send an email to hiring@cord.com with a link to your CV/profile, and – crucially – what’s a cool tech fact you’ve learned recently. 😀
