It’s big business, and we’re the UK’s clear leader in this growing space, with thousands of dog owners already using our innovative devices, friendly app and sophisticated cloud services every day. And boy do they love us!
Based in central Cambridge (near the station), our engineering team of around fifteen people creates almost all of our technology in-house. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s really hard, But we’re smart, we work fast and we have fun. And now we’re looking for new people who’d like to join us and do the same.
Here’s what you’ll DO
- Develop and design software for the PitPat app and supporting services. This could range from adding an exciting new feature one day to refactoring and redesigning existing code another day.
- Participate and/or lead projects from the outset to completion. This involves designing solutions, scoping the work, and working with Product and QA to understand requirements and testing.
- Participate in scrum events like planning, retrospectives, sprint reviews, and of course, daily stand-up!
Our TECH STACK
- We develop interactive mobile apps on iOS and Android in C# using Xamarin.
- Our back-end cloud services are built using the latest .NET stack and live in Microsoft Azure.
- Fully-automated testing and build pipeline development are carried out by our QA and DevOps functions so that developers can focus on developing great code.
- We’re continually looking for new and better ways to put our dev team in charge of how we develop our code in the most productive and robust ways.
The TECH SKILLS you’ll need
You don’t need to have every skill here, but the more the better. As we’re a small team, you’ll have the opportunity to get your hands dirty working on anything and everything. We’re looking for experience of:
- SOLID principles and design patterns.
- Writing testable, performant code.
- Developing REST APIs in the latest .NET stack.
- T-SQL, or similar technologies, and relational databases.
- NoSQL databases such as Table Storage.
- Developing on cloud-based environments like AWS and Azure, or GCP (we use Azure).
- Xamarin development, or related technology like WPF.
OTHER SKILLS you’ll need
- People who get stuff done. We can’t overstate this. We ship working software to real users in a fast-moving market that works in dog years (that’s 7x faster)!
- Attention to quality. We can’t overstate this either. Every bug we ship damages our reputation, and every bit of code that’s hard to modify costs us time and money.
- Technical virtuosity. We’re small, so we have to be smart. We need software “artists” with a genuine passion for creating clean, fast software that really “sings”.
- Commercial and user nous. Sorry, it’s not enough to be a technical wizard. You also need to understand why we’re doing it, and appreciate what makes our users tick.
- Independence and teamwork. Yes, both. We need people who can work unsupervised by themselves on one day, and as a part of the pack the next.
- Clear thinking under uncertainty. We live in a complex world and we don’t always have all the data. We need people who can fill in the gaps and imagine the whole picture.
- A “can do” approach to life. If something looks hard – impossible even – we still try to find a way to do it, or something very like it. See also “get stuff done” above.
What we OFFER IN RETURN
- The chance to use today’s most relevant and exciting technologies to build new software that gets released to real users (dog owners!) as often as every two weeks.
- An incredibly supportive and friendly team that believes in listening to everyone’s ideas and helping everyone to do their very best job.
- The opportunity to kick start or grow your career through our commitment to on-the-job training and our fortnightly “hack Friday” sessions.
- Fully-flexible working based either from our easy-to-get-to office (bring your dog if you like) or from your home, or both. As long as you’re in the UK, you could work with us.
- The chance to be part of a successful tech start-up, and to see from the inside what makes a fast-growing business like ours succeed.
- A fun and sociable culture with lunchtime BBQs in our garden and regular out-of-hours events.
How to APPLY
We’d love to talk to you, and there will be lots of people wanting to talk to us. But we can’t talk to everyone. For the best chance, we’d love you to send TWO things to talent@pitpatpet.com:
- Your CV.
- A brief email mentioning how your previous experience would help you make the best contribution to our team according to the “What we NEED” section above.
In return, we promise to reply letting you know whether we’d like to take the conversation further. And if we do, and you have a dog, don’t forget to ask us for a PitPat with our compliments. :-)
Good luck!