About this role
We’re a small and tight-knit team of 7 at Alva, of which 3 are software engineers. You’ll work with everyone in the team and will report directly to Phil, Alva’s CTO. As a senior engineer, you’ll be taking an active part in planning, building and monitoring our software products.
Alva is building novel, next-generation healthcare services that have the potential to scale to serving millions of women. Our top priority is delivering safe, high-quality care. Software is just the tool that enables us to do that in a scalable way. What that means is that, for the most part, we choose to use boring, mature and reliable technology. For example, we store permanent data in Postgres, transient data in Redis and use Heroku to keep our infrastructure simple. We don’t have microservices and probably won’t need them anytime soon.
We’re in the very early days of forming our engineering culture and you’ll play a big part in shaping it. We value good communication as highly as good code. We pair program frequently together and help each other develop, for example with our bi-weekly knowledge sharing. We all take ownership and responsibility for our work and therefore critical thinking and new ideas are valued. This is aligned with our wider company culture, which you can read about here.
What you’ll be doing
-Being heavily involved with the planning, building and monitoring of our products and features. You’ll be leading some of these projects, which often involves working with the wider team.
-Working on our consumer-facing and internal products.
-Working across our backend and frontend.
-Developing and maintaining our accessibility-first design system from the ground up.
-Collaborating with our designer on user research, and working with other members of the team to understand their needs for internal tools.
-Collaborating on the development of our design / engineering / product team processes.
-We’re a small company and it’s often all hands on deck. There’s a good chance you’ll occasionally be helping with things beyond your role.
What we’re looking for
-Great communication skills; the ability to breakdown problems, explain work, and relay information in ways that help everyone move forward with a shared understanding.
-We don’t have a strict “number of years” policy, but want to highlight this is a senior role. Typically that would mean at least 4 to 6 years of experience.
-Deep understanding of, and significant experience working with Typescript and Postgres.
-Experience working with modern frontend frameworks and patterns. Our frontend is built with Vue.
-Experience working in small and fast-paced team environments. Healthcare experience is a bonus, but not a requirement.
-Ability to design systems from scratch and take ownership of planning and delivering complex projects.
-A good understanding of tech debt and the ability to balance the priorities of today with building strong foundations for the long term.
-Understanding of security best practices.
-An eagerness to be actively involved in the whole product development process, not just your domain. We need everyone to think and problem solve like product managers.
-Attention to detail and a desire to raise the bar.
-A passion for company culture and the conviction to contribute to it.
-At this time we can only offer roles to people who have the right to live and work in the UK.
Benefits
A competitive salary with twice yearly salary reviews.
Own a part of Alva through our employee share option scheme.
28 days of holiday per year, plus bank holidays. We also have an extra “birthday bank holiday” policy (take your birthday off, or the Monday after if it’s on the weekend 🥳).
Flexible working hours – work at the times that are best for you.
Pension contributions.
A dog-friendly office 🐶 (and a team dog called Susan) with a lot of plants 🌱. It’s next to Broadway Market.
Our benefits get reviewed periodically with input from the team.
How to apply
Please send an email to clare@withalva.com with
Your resume and/or LinkedIn profile
Contact details and some times you’d be free for a 30 minute intro call