Engineering Manager
Bloom & Wild
Software Engineering, Other Engineering
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Posted on Wednesday, April 17, 2024
bloomon is turning the flower industry on its head – for the better. How? By disrupting the traditional supply chain! We skip the auction and wholesale, to shorten the journey for our flowers. And we harness technology, brand and innovation to deliver gifts and subscriptions that delight our customers across Europe.
We launched in Amsterdam in 2014, and in 2021 joined forces with Bloom & Wild, the UK's fastest growing ecommerce company (according to the Financial Times). Our group is backed by top tier investors and is now home to a family of 3 strong brands, Bloom & Wild, bloomon and Bergamotte. Together, we’ve delivered over 20 million orders (and counting!), making us the largest direct to consumer flower business in Europe.
Our vision is to create the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful. And we won't stop at flowers and plants. Starting with the Bloom & Wild brand, we're expanding our gifting offering to other categories like cakes, candles and cocktails. This is all part of our ambition to build Europe's #1 direct to consumer gifting destination.
We really care about creating a diverse and inclusive team - so we welcome people from all backgrounds, with different perspectives, ideas and experiences to work with us. In our team, everyone has the freedom to give their opinion, grow in their career and be part of a genuinely caring and inclusive team.
⚙️Technology at Bloom & Wild
Here at Bloom & Wild the Product Engineering team is organised into cross functional squads, each responsible for a business and architectural domain. They are supported by Platform and Data Engineering and are part of the wider Technology team
You’ll lead the Production & Procurement squad, a cross-functional squad working within our Ops-Tech team. The primary focus of the squad is our internal systems that facilitate daily operations within our multiple warehouses (for example the production of bouquets and fulfilment of orders). This is one of the most unique and innovative areas of our business, and as our business continues to experience significant organic and inorganic growth, we have ambitious plans to innovate and scale our operations further.
We work with some great technology; our stack consists of a number of Python-based (micro-)services with React frontend, currently running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You’ll play a key part, together with Tech Leads and our Principal Engineers, in ensuring that the squad is picking the right technologies as we continue to scale.
Most of our team is based in the UK or the Netherlands and works in a flexible model, with choice in how often they travel to the office. Our squads meet all in person at least once per quarter in order to maintain connections, collaborate on larger projects and have fun together.
You can read lots more about our technology stack and our culture over on our tech blog - Code Wild
💻 What you’ll be doing
- You’ll lead the Warehouse Operations squad, reporting into the Director of Engineering for Ops-Tech.
- Being a key member of the Ops-Tech leadership team, working closely with Product and Engineering leaders in shaping the future of the Production & Procurement technology offering and executing on key strategic technical initiatives within the domain.
- Taking a hands-on approach to owning delivery in the squad, ensuring that the quarterly portfolio of work is effectively planned, estimated and delivered.
- Line managing the engineers, focusing on their growth and development, and ensuring that the team has the skills and experience that it needs to be successful.
- In addition you’ll work closely with other Engineering Managers, Director of Engineering, Senior Technology leadership and community of practice leads to shape the technology and people roadmap and strategy going forwards, ensuring that we are improving the whole team and optimising the approach for more than just your squad
✅ You’ll love this role if you… (What excites us)
- Have previous experience managing an engineering (backend heavy) team, backed by a minimum of 3 years of relevant experience in a hands-on engineering management role.
- You’ve created environments that promote both autonomy and accountability. You’ll be a great coach and servant leader, able to motivate and guide the squad through the good times and the bad, learning and improving as you go.
- You’ll be able to demonstrate how you’ve taken responsibility for performance management, career progression and pastoral care.
- You’ll take a collaborative, data-driven and experimental approach to solving complex problems, and have the ability to foster this mindset in your teams.
- You like solving complex technical problems and have extensive prior software (backend) development experience of at least 6 years.
- Occasionally get stuck-in and code. While we don’t expect our Engineering Managers to be regularly coding, you will need to actively engage with the codebase so as to be able to understand the systems, support those within your team with technical challenges, break down requirements, and understand the underlying complexities in the domain.
- Have working knowledge of distributed service architectures, including what infrastructure and best practices to follow to ensure data integrity, stability, replayability. And, additionally, you have experience reasoning about and debugging common issues in such architectures.
- Are keen to learn and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, and value sharing your knowledge with your peers.
- Detailed knowledge of Python in a production environment utilising GCP.
- Experience working in warehouse operations or supply chain domains.
- A mix of back-end and frontend experience. The squad works on back-end focussed tools, but there is a focus on the admin staff User Experience to support warehouse teams that are on a strict schedule. For this, squads use React and Typescript.
It would be great if you also have...
These are some of the skills and experience we think will enable success in this role, but please don’t worry if you are missing some of these. We’re committed to building a team made up of different strengths, skills and experiences, so if you’re excited about our values, passionate about what you do and would like to join us in doing things more thoughtfully, we’d love to hear from you.
🏡 Belonging at Bloom & Wild Group
We know that we learn through our differences, and building a diverse team has always been central to creating the best experience for our customers. We value all backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and experiences, and encourage everyone to share their opinions openly within our caring and inclusive team.
🧭 Our ways of working
We do things a little bit differently. From inventing letterbox flowers to founding The Thoughtful Marketing Movement. We’re big on collaboration, empathy, knowledge sharing and growth, and our values drive our priorities every day:
Lead change for good: we have the guts to try new things and step up to do what matters most
Think deeply, act swiftly: we make sure there’s thoughtful rationale behind our approach and always act swiftly to implement ideas
Care wildly: we pour care and creativity into everything we do and pay attention to the things that make a difference
Stay open, be curious: we’re open about what we’re doing and why, and we welcome challenges from each other
We really believe in the power of face-to-face connections - be that through a shared project, a learning and development opportunity, or an after work social - and trust our teams to make the right decisions (for them and us) about where and how they work each day. Our working patterns are flexible and vary across the business, depending on the type of work, need for collaboration, and personal and wellbeing circumstances.
🌟 (Some of) The good stuff
To care wildly for our customers, firstly we care wildly for our teams. We work hard to craft a culture of thoughtfulness and care, where there is a strong sense of inclusion and belonging, enabling all of our people to thrive and be successful each day.
🌻 Work that works for you
- Flexible working (core hours from 10-4pm)
- Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year
- Share in our success with a choice to take equity options from day 1
- 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart
- We’ll support your commute to our office and site locations. Depending on your journey to work, this may include a Swapfiets, an NS business card or expense reimbursement
- Phone allowance
🌴 Time off
- 24 vacation days and an option to buy an extra 5 each year
- Happiness days (1 extra day each quarter for your personal ‘me time’)
- 1 celebration day per year, to celebrate a holiday that’s important to you
- Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar
🌱 Health and wellbeing
- Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions
- Allies and champions groups
- Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers
- In person and virtual yoga every week
- Our office kitchen is stocked with healthy drinks and snacks to keep you going
- Workplace pension contributions
🌳 Growth & Development
- A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme
- Internal & external Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics.
💐 Moments that matter
- We love having lunch together! We offer daily fresh and healthy lunch options at our locations in Amsterdam and Amstelveen,
- A BBQ-worthy rooftop terrace (Amsterdam HQ)
- Social & wellbeing monthly calendar
- We love to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones!
- Summer and End of Year events, team lunches and post-peak celebrations
- Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!
🫱🫲 Getting hired
We’ll do everything we can to make sure your interview experience with us is a good one. It’s a 2-way process, and we’re keen to answer all of the questions you may have, so that you can be sure (and excited!) that we’ll be the right place for you.
- Apply below (it takes 2 minutes!)
- Chat with Billy, our Senior Talent Manager for Tech to discuss our role and learn a bit more about your skills and background and how we might match your career & development goals.
- An interview with Oskar, our Engineering Director to get into more of the detail.
- Show us your technical skills and get to know two of the engineers from the squad.
- Prove your product mindset in chat with our Product Managers.
- Demonstrate your technical and people leadership skills in a final call with our VP of Engineering.
We believe in leading change for good, so do let us know if there’s anything we can do to support your application process. Also, if you have any feedback, please help us to improve our candidate experience by sharing (anonymously) here.