Product Engineer Internship (Summer 2025)

Closing Date: 22nd November 2024 (First Round)

📍London | 💰 £40,000 pro rata

We’re on a mission to empower independent businesses across the UK to offer the best deliveries on Earth, saving them time, money and stress, and making their customers the happiest they can be.

With the various surfaces our product touches, from merchants with the merchant dashboard, to consumers through our tracking page and drivers & operations with our routing & driver app, you’ll be able to have an impact on a wide range of users, and in areas where there is incredible potential to improve upon the industry status quo and delivery a truly wonderful experience.

🛠 Engineering at Packfleet

We're a small team of 7 engineers with big ambitions for the future. For our tech stack we’ve leaned on a combination of TypeScript where developer productivity is more important, and Rust in specific areas where speed matters. We have a “well-sized services” approach which gives us flexibility to use the right language for the job, which unlike microservices the number of services grows slowly over time.

For our backend infrastructure we use Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to orchestrate our services. We make use of code generation and type-safe, language-agnostic interfaces like protobuf and GraphQL as much as we can. Using continuous deployment running on Github Actions, we deploy our backend dozens of times per day.

🌱 Engineering Internships

As a product engineer intern at Packfleet, you'll be paired up with a member of the team who you'll spend the summer working with on real-world problems that have an impact on our users. They'll support you to design and ship a solution(s) to this.

You'll also have the chance to learn from others in the team, whether engineers working in different specialities, or from folks in our operations or sales team to see how everything works at a startup our size.

You should be excited about what we're doing and building great experiences that have a real-world impact. You should also have past experience of backend or frontend development that you can use as a jumping off point in your internship.

What you’ll be doing day to day:

• Writing, testing and shipping code that improves the lives of our merchants, recipients, drivers, or our ops team
• Reviewing code for your colleagues, to pick up any improvements and learn from your peers
• Understanding the needs of our users with the team to to build something great for them, whether for recipients, merchants or folks in our operations team
• Chatting with people in the team about how we should build something, fix an interesting issue, or design a feature, whether they’re an engineer or a designer or an operations manager
• Learning about new tech, best practices and what a full-time software engineering role looks like
• Proactively seeking out feedback to improve yourself and your learning

What you’ll be using: 

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

• Typescript with React Next.js for our public web apps and internal tools
• Typescript to write our backend code
• Rust to write our VRP solver
• PostgreSQL for our persistent data storage
• Kubernetes to run our services hosted on GCP
• React Native and Swift for our driver & warehouse app
• Metabase, R & SQL for querying our data warehouse (BigQuery) and visualising data
  

What the application process looks like:

1. Submit your application answering the short questions 
2. If you’re successful, we’ll invite you to an initial call and to complete an exercise to demonstrate your programming and problem-solving skills
3. If all goes well, you’ll have your final interviews with members of the teamover Google Meet

🏡 Logistics (pun intended 🫢)

This role is based at our office & warehouse in Bermondsey, London, just a 10 minute walk from South Bermondsey station.

We currently work in a hybrid set-up, where we aim to spend at least 3 days/week together in the office and working remotely the rest of the time, keeping us close to the drivers in the team and the physical elements of our business whilst also giving flexibility for remote working.

💌 How to apply

You can apply here in just a few minutes, and if you have any questions or queries you’re welcome also to drop an email to [email protected] as well. We are able to sponsor visas for this role.

💛 Our commitment to diversity

We care deeply about creating a diverse team so we particularly encourage applications from people from different underrepresented demographics and encourage you, regardless of your background and past experience, to apply if the role excites you.

If we want to solve problems for people across the UK (and one day around the world), our team has to represent those we’re solving them for. So we need to attract the best talent and create an environment that supports and includes them.

Requirements

You should apply if:

• You’re excited about what we’re doing! We’re a technology company working in a very traditional industry and that gives us a huge opportunity to build something truly different.
• You’re comfortable getting hands-on in a very early stage startup environment. We’re still a small team!
• You have some experience with an area of our tech stack already and are excited to keep learning and applying your knowledge.
• You're passionate about problem solving, new technologies and taking on feedback to grow yourself.
• You are available full-time for 6-12 weeks sometime between June and September 2025.
• You have the full right to work in the UK with no limitations during the 6-12 weeks. 
• You can work from our office in London on a hybrid basis (2 or 3 days a week) to collaborate with your mentor and the wider team.

Benefits

What you’ll get:

• A competitive internally-transparent salary of £40,000 pro-rated based on your time with us.
• Experience at an early stage startup, with a team that’s taken companies from zero-to-one before.
• A close knit working environment where everybody is working in the same direction, with regular monthly socials.
• Our Recharge Day on the last Friday of every month: a day to spend doing something you enjoy with others in the team. This can be anything from an escape room, crazy golf, climbing, to wine tasting.
• A budget to spend at our merchants every month, as well as free deliveries through Packfleet, so you can support independent businesses and also get the Packfleet experience first hand.
• The equipment you need to work to your best, including a shiny new top-spec Space Black MacBook Pro