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Boba

Junior Software Engineer

London, UK
Financial Services
Ventures that will empower all
Active
4 minutes ago
Responds to
N/A
Responds in
5h 44m
Requests
2 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Junior
Tech stack/tooling used: Python, SQL, Git, APIs, AWS
Core skills considered: Python, SQL, Git, APIs
Other skills considered: React, Typescript, AWS, PostgreSQL, Docker

Logistics

Base salary: £40K - £45K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Based in Chiswick, London, Boba Commodities has traded commodity futures since 2013. The point of the profit is what we do with it: investing into community or planet enhancing businesses around the world that share our values.

That isn't a page on our website. It's why the company exists. We're carbon negative — we double-offset our footprint, backdated to our first day of trading. We don't trade fossil fuels.

We are a proprietary trading firm, meaning we have no clients or investors driving our business. This frees us to decide what we do, how we do it and when we do it.

What it's actually like here

We're a small team, so what you build gets used. Write something on Tuesday, watch a trader use it on Wednesday.

Four values, and we live them, not laminate them:

  • 80/20 — we'd rather ship something good on Tuesday than something perfect next month.
  • Adapt&Evolve — we won't get it right first time, but we’ll learn. We're fine saying that out loud.
  • Best Ideas Rise To The Top — the best idea wins, not the most senior one. In our meetings, senior people speak last on purpose.
  • Care Personally — everyone here is a person, not a resource. We care about our output because someone next to us relies on it. We have each other’s backs.

These core values are intrinsic in our culture and in everything we do.

What we put behind you

A professionally qualified coach, from day one and a tenured Engineer as mentor. A book a month for self-development. Support for certifications. 39 days holiday, taken whenever you want. An allowance for whatever gets you moving — gym, jiu-jitsu, running club.

If you're early in your career, that's the point of this role. We'll teach you the markets. You bring the curiosity.

How we work
  • Small team, low process, high ownership
  • We value pragmatism over perfection (80/20 mindset)
  • We prioritise impact over activity, we roll up our sleeves and get it done
  • We expect people to challenge ideas and contribute to better solutions

We set high standards, but we don't expect perfection. You'll make mistakes as you learn; what matters is taking ownership, learning from them and improving. You'll get direct, timely feedback and we expect you to give feedback too.

What you will be doing…

You'll join a small engineering team building technology that directly supports our trading business. You'll:

  • Build and improve Python and SQL applications used by our Trading, Finance and Operations teams.
  • Work on real features, automation and business problems from day one.
  • Learn how to write clean, maintainable and well-tested production software through code review and feedback.
  • Investigate bugs and technical problems, learning how to break complex problems into manageable steps.
  • Work directly with the people using the software so you understand the why behind what you're building.
  • Contribute ideas about how our technology and ways of working could be better.
  • Gradually take ownership of increasingly complex pieces of work as your skills develop.
We need someone who has…

Read these one at a time, not as a checklist. If some are missing, message us anyway….

  • 0-1 years of industry experience developing production software in Python and SQL, ideally on cloud infrastructure; or you’ve written Python/SQL outside of tutorials such as a personal project, placement or bootcamp
  • Relational Databases and core database concepts such as, querying, schemas, and transactions
  • Familiarity with Git processes (branching strategies and repo management)
  • Familiarity building or consuming REST APIs, with a basic understanding of HTTP methods, status codes, request/response handling, and JSON.
  • A structured approach to debugging software issues – you can explain how you narrowed a problem down, what you ruled out and how you knew you had found it.
Things you will have the opportunity to learn and work with…

We don't expect you to know all of these when you join (two would be plenty), we are looking for someone with the willingness and interest to learn….

  • Integrating software with productivity tools such as Excel, Slack, and others.
  • Designing or building low-latency trading systems, comparable infrastructure or related operational/trading processes.
  • Modern front-end technologies such as REACT, typescript or next.js
  • Integrating applications with databases such as Postgres and MongoDB through code
  • AWS services, including but not limited to EC2, Lambda, Aurora, S3
  • Data visualization tools and technologies to create effective dashboards and reports
  • Understanding methods such as DevOps and CI/CD tools and best practices and working in teams using these methods.
  • Container technologies such as Docker and container orchestration platforms such as Amazon ECS or Kubernetes.
  • Event-driven and real time data architectures, including stream processing technologies such as Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis.
  • Monitoring, logging and observability tooling such as DataDog or Grafana
  • Workflow or data orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow
  • Strong focus on software quality, maintainability and robust automated testing through quality assurance and quality controls.
  • Development and testing practices like Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Test Driven Development (TDD) or continuous performance testing.
You’ll fit well here if …

These aren't screening criteria — they're what the job actually asks of you day to day.

  • You've dropped your own approach because someone else's was better, and in a discussion, you can summarise someone's point back to them accurately before making your own.
  • You've taught yourself something technical that no course required and used it for something real — and you can name one thing about how you work that you're trying to improve.
  • You've got something wrong and can describe plainly what you did next. When you're stuck, you say so.
  • You can walk someone through how you found a bug: what you suspected, what you ruled out, how you knew. And you can argue both sides of a technical decision you've made.
  • You've explained something technical to someone non-technical and checked they'd followed it. You write short messages rather than long ones.
  • You've noticed a teammate struggling and done something about it without being asked.
  • You say when your work will be done, tell people early when that changes, and know when to stop polishing and hand it over.
How we use AI

We're direct about this because you'll want to know before you apply.

  • We expect you to use it. We pay for the tooling and we'd rather you got to a working answer in two hours than two days. That's 80/20 applied to your own workflow.
  • We expect you to understand what you’ve done. Whoever or whatever wrote the code, you own it — which means being able to explain why it works and debug it when it doesn't. Use AI in the technical task if you want to; we'll be asking about your understanding of what you produced, not whether you typed it yourself.
  • Humans make the decisions. Trading calls, code review, anything that touches production. No exceptions, and no plans to change that.
  • What we don't do, and won't: share any trading data, company data and employee data - these don't go into third-party AI tools. We don't connect agents to our infrastructure. We don't take a vendor's word for how our data is handled.
Why diversity and inclusion is highly important to us

An inclusive and diverse workplace means we highly value differences in race, gender, nationality, culture, sexual orientation, physical ability, cognition, age and background as these differences bring new or different ways of thinking about our work. Therefore, creating a workplace culture that advances belonging and psychological safety brings a mutual respect and acceptance of others and fuels our values of caring personally, adapting and evolving and the best ideas rising to the top.

Please let us know if you need any adjustments to the process.

Company Benefits

We are growing and adding to how we want to make Boba the best place to work on the planet and are always listening to what our team think we can do to achieve that. On top of a culture of personal growth, caring personally, inclusivity where your ideas are heard and often implemented, we can offer:

  • Annual discretionary performance bonus.
  • Support from a professionally qualified Coach to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.
  • A tenured engineer as your mentor from day one.
  • Physical health allowance where we provide an allowance to each employee to use towards a physical activity of their choice (e.g., gym membership, Brazilian ju-jitsu, personal trainer, running club; pretty much anything as long as it gets you moving!)
  • 39 days holiday, to be taken whenever you want subject to ensuring we have operational and trading coverage. We do not mandate you work public holidays nor do we mandate you must take them off, instead we recognise that UK bank holidays do not always align to important dates for everyone so give you the choice.
  • Pension contribution.
  • Income protection scheme and life insurance scheme.
  • A book a month for personal development.
  • Support to pursue professional certifications/qualifications.
  • Fridge full of snacks and drinks (healthy and less-healthy options are available!)
  • ‘Bobaversary’ recognition for reaching significant milestones in your career with us.

Other examples of situational/ad-hoc schemes we have run for our employees:

  • Surprise and delight – we sent our people gifts from us during mandatory WFH periods, just to show we are thinking about them.
  • Boba Social Events such as away weekends or team activities
  • Social events&celebratory gifts for achieving team goals.

Interview Process

Three steps, usually 2-3 weeks start to finish. If you need any adjustments, let us know. We will reimburse reasonable travel costs outside of London.

Step 1 – Initial Interview (remote): Getting to know you (30-45mins)

A non-technical discussion with Iain (our Chief of Staff/Chief People and Culture Officer) who will tell you a little bit of who we are as a company, our values and what we are trying to achieve; and then some questions to get to know you better.

Step 2 – Technical Assessment (take home, in your own time): 3-4hrs over 7 days

A task based on a real-world technical requirement. Detailed brief will be provided. No commodities trading experience needed. You can use AI if you want to — we'll be focusing on your understanding of what you produced and where and how you'd adapt it. If you reach four hours and aren't finished, stop and send us what you have. We'd rather see your reasoning than a finished answer.

Step 3 – Final Interview (in person): 2 hrs (with breaks)

We’d love to host you in our offices in Chiswick, London.

First, 45 minutes with Luke (our Senior Engineer) going through your submission. Then 30 minutes with Iain. Then a short break — a genuine two-way decision point: if either side doesn't think it's a fit, we'd rather say so now than have you spend another hour on us. If we're both still keen, you'll meet Samir (our CEO) for 20 minutes.

We will then get back to you within 2-3 working days.

Examples of early success in this role include the following…
  • Learning and upskilling quickly - both technically and in ways of working.
  • Jumping in getting your hands dirty – learning as you go.
  • Getting to know your stakeholders and what they need.
  • Spotting a problem and then fixing it, without being asked to.

Message prompt from Iain

Iain on cord4m
Active 4 minutes ago
Tell us about something you've built or taught yourself that no course or person made you do. What broke, and what did you do about it? Why this role/company? A few lines is plenty — we're interested in how you think not how polished it sounds. No need to summarise your CV — we'll read that anyway
Iain on cord4m
Active 4 minutes ago
Chief of Staff & Chief People and Culture Officer
Active 4 minutes ago
Iain on cord
Junior Software Engineer at Boba
Message Iain  ·  Typically responds within hours

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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