Head of Ecommerce Engineering

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At Wonderbly, we make personalised books that inspire boundless self-belief in children and celebrate love in all kinds of relationships. Our books have allowed over ten million readers to see themselves as the hero of their own stories.

Technology unpins everything we do. We have built a highly specialised and scalable ecommerce platform to deliver the premium experiences our customers love. We are constantly innovating and improving this stack, from building new UX journeys to scaling our global fulfilment network.

This new role within the Technology team, reporting to the CTO, will be the engineering leader and owner of our ecommerce platform. It’s a highly technical role that requires an experienced engineering leader who can take ownership, make key architectural decisions and steer the careers of their team.

As part of Wonderbly’s senior leadership team, you will represent this key engineering pillar by reporting on the roadmap delivery, systems stability and proposing new tooling for other departments to leverage. An important relationship will be with our product managers, who you will partner with to craft and deliver future customer experiences in and around wonderbly.com.

You will be equally comfortable writing code and communicating complex technical problems to anyone at Wonderbly. While coding and helping others code is an essential part of the role, it is just as important to be able to connect each feature to our long-term strategy.

The full-time team currently consists of two frontend and two backend engineers as well as a QA automation engineer. It will be your responsibility to develop the career paths of your talented full-time team, providing them constructive feedback and allowing them to benefit from your experience.

You will also manage the freelancers and/or agencies we routinely need to deliver key initiatives throughout the year. Working with your team, you will be continuously seeking improvements in DX, velocity, onboarding and process.

Lastly and most importantly, we’re a people-first company. Wonderbly has three values: courageousness, curiosity and kindness. We want everyone to strive for these values, and our senior managers are no exception. That’s why you are a teacher, explainer, mentor as well as a coder and leader. People in your team and outside it will want to work with and learn from you.

About our stack

Our ecommerce stack powers wonderbly.com, handling personalised orders with a modern frontend and a set of backend services. Over the last 5 years, we’ve continuously refined this stack.

Our frontend, built in the last year, is nearing completion on migrating from our legacy site. We use Astro for fast rendering, TypeScript, Vite, Storybook, Radix, and more. It’s a monorepo using Turborepo, pnpm, and Docker.

The frontend connects to our headless ecommerce API, built on Solidus, an open-source Ruby framework. We collaborate with Solidus maintainers for support. Algolia powers product discovery, and Prismic supplies content. We’ve developed a caching service to index this data.

Our backend services, aside from Solidus, are built with Node, TypeScript, and Express, handling fulfilment, stock, emails, and more. Everything runs on Heroku, with Fastly for edge caching and security.

We aim to keep things simple and efficient, and you’ll help us stay focused on that balance, knowing when to speed up or slow down. Simple, easy-to-reason implementations are the goal.

What to expect in the next 12 months

• Leading the team to deliver our next personalisation product discovery & creation mission
• Obsessing over our customer’s experience: loading performance, interactivity, and site stability
• Scaling our technology systems to keep pace with business growth, our publishing roadmap and expansion into new product categories
• Optimising our scoping and delivery processes while improving our first-class dev team
• Ensuring systems are secure and scalable, leading efforts to prepare for peak trading events and being on-call with your team for any issues
• Regularly contributing to weekly team and all company meetings, sharing your knowledge and insight
• Advancing the careers of your reports and celebrating their progress company-wide
• Laying the foundations for a new generation of technology to support Wonderbly’s growth

Requirements

• 10+ years experience working in different roles across multiple development teams, with at least 5 years in a management role
• Deep understanding of designing and building complex systems for high traffic customer-facing companies like ours
• Ability to decide when making trade-offs between speed vs quality, and can communicate clearly why when you choose one over the other
• Find joy in programming and relish making tough design decisions by comparing the many languages/tools/libraries that you might use to solve a problem
• A natural love of people’s career development, aided by your guidance, feedback and being champion of their achievements
• Always challenging yourself and others to be better and improve
• Appreciation of nicely designed, high-quality, well-tested codebases – and ability to communicate why they’re important
• An instinctive and easy empathy with all colleagues

Benefits

First and foremost, you should join Wonderbly because of the work we do. We’re on a mission to bring our meaningfully personalised products to everyone around the world. You’ll be surrounded by inclusive, diverse and self-motivated people inspired by this exciting mission.

We’re a profitable and responsibly run business. We have clear processes with sensible expectations and are always looking to improve. We have a strongly supportive and inclusive culture and are still small enough for individuals to make a big difference.

We have exciting growth plans, we want to create deeper connections between customers and their important relationships into the heart of our books.

On top of that, you can expect:

• Competitive salary + bonus
• 5 weeks remote working per year
• 28 days holiday, plus 8 bank holidays
• Subsidised gym membership
• Mental Health support with Spill
• £500 Learnably budget per year
• Pension scheme with matched contributions
• Health insurance with Bupa to keep you and your family in tip-top shape
• Lunch and Learn sessions with interesting speakers on various topics

We are remote-friendly with a flexible hybrid policy. You are welcome to work at our lovely, well-appointed studio in Bloomsbury at any time. Our hybrid policy is being in the office three days a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and another day that suits you. Additionally, you can work from anywhere five weeks a year, as long as you overlap our working day.

At our studio, there is:

• Shower, secure bike storage (we are also part of the Cycle To Work scheme)
• Heaps of snacks, drinks, and comforts in our fully-stocked kitchen
• Group yoga / walking and other fun stuff
• Clubs for bookworms, runners, gardeners, aspiring poets and much more

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