Product Engineer

We’re looking for a product engineer to join our team. You'll be pragmatic, have a great product-mindset, keeping users at the heart of how you think, and have a passion for great UI and UX. You already have past experience of backend development and are comfortable working with React on the frontend too.

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.

You’ll be able to be flexible, switching between working on the frontend or the backend when needed even being excited for going out to do deliveries with a driver, visiting merchants, handling packages within the depot, and moving beyond ‘engineering’ when needed to to help the business and gain a first hand understanding of the problems you’re trying to help solve.

As an early engineer, this is a unique opportunity for you to help shape what we build, and the way we build it. There’s still so much to do and learn, in every aspect of Packfleet — we’re only just beginning our journey!

What you’ll be doing day to day:

• Building new features in our product that improve the lives of our merchants, recipients, drivers or our internal operations (or all of the above!)
• Using your product mindset to understand the needs of our users and leading the way on how best to build something great for them, whether for recipients, merchants or folks in our operations team
• Chatting with folks 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
• Improving our tooling or infrastructure as needed to make it easier for us to debug issues or scale as we have more users
• Sharing your opinions on designs, goals, operational problems, hiring, etc. and giving feedback to others to help us do the best we can
• Occasionally getting hands-on, going out with drivers to do deliveries or handling packages in the depot, to get an end-to-end understanding of the problems we’re trying to solve
• Getting the opportunity to input into other areas of the business that interest you, whether that’s helping on sales, refining our operations, or anything else
  

🛠 Engineering at Packfleet

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.

We tend towards paying for tools or services as opposed to building them ourselves, if we can put money towards a problem that would otherwise take a lot of our time whilst still creating the user experience we desire than we’ll aim to do so. We’ll try to keep our investments in a few tools/services rather than having many ways to save the same problems, and are conscious of the number of innovation tokens we spend.

It’s good to know what to expect and a little about how we do things currently, but there’s plenty to improve and the mindset you bring is far more important than your familiarity with our tech stack or tools. So if you’re not so familiar with some of the tools or languages then don’t let that dissuade you, your way of thinking and experience is much more important.

🏡 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 2 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.

We're happy to be more flexible here for the right candidate after they've fully onboarded too.

💌 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 and so you’ll be involved in everything.
• You have experience building backend services and APIs for product-focussed teams and are comfortable writing code that runs on the frontend too — having experience with Typescript is a plus, but not a requirement.
• You care about the users we are creating products for and are comfortable working without a product owner/manager and instead using your own product mindset to lead on how we solve user problems.
• You are comfortable in the face of ambiguity and are happy to take on problems without a clear definition or solution.
• You are comfortable putting something out there when it’s not-perfectly-polished to gather feedback, whether that’s an MVP of a feature, a draft of a proposal, or your thoughts on a design.
• You care about the team and culture we are building, and understand the importance of giving feedback and supporting others around you.

Benefits

What you’ll get:

• A competitive internally-transparent salary and stock options in Packfleet, with the choice to trade-off salary for additional stock options on signing. The range for this role, based on level/seniority and salary trade-off, is £70,000 - £120,000 alongside meaningful equity.
• 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.
• A company & culture that cares about the people within it, with benefits like health insurance, mental health days-off, a learning budget, internally-transparent salaries and 35 days holiday (inc. bank holidays) with top-ups & unpaid holiday if you need more.
• Our Recharge Day on the last Friday of every month: is 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 Space Black MacBook Pro (M3 Pro 12/18C, 36GB, 512GB)