As a software engineer, new job offers are probably coming at you thick and fast. We get it — the market is full of exciting new tech companies offering a variety of roles. So, why should you come and work with us, a company you probably haven’t heard of? We think it boils down to 5 main reasons (we expand on each of these further down the page, so feel free to skip to any you find interesting):

1. Diverse technical challenges

For a small(ish) company, our products throw out some complex and interesting technical challenges for us to get stuck into.

1. A modern, battle-tested tech stack

We enjoy working with modern tech, but our code has to be reliable and we actively look for tech with a great community behind it — which is why we use Python/Django/vue.js/Postgres/AWS.

1. Relaxed working patterns

We prioritise a great work-life balance (no, really). We deliver stuff as fast as we can but in realistic timeframes.

1. Great team culture

We’re an eclectic bunch of engineers with a diverse range of interests, from D&D and gaming, to figure skating and combat juggling.

1. Lots of opportunities to grow

As we grow our platform, there will be many more opportunities to develop skills in different areas of engineering.

$$ \colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{1. Diverse technical challenges}} $$

$\colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{Our platforms}}$

Our platforms are the core of our business and everyone in our company contributes towards their success. Our engineering teams do everything from building new features and showing off new datasets, to helping us gather, pipeline and store our data. Here’s a short demo of one of our platforms from our marketing website so you can get a sense of what it's like:

<aside> <img src="/icons/warning_gray.svg" alt="/icons/warning_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Many of you will notice the platform in this quick demo is in our old brand, an update on its way soon hopefully.

</aside>

Product video w new logo.mp4

$\colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{Some example technical challenges}}$

Here are a few examples of the different technical challenges we are facing and a few we think we’ll face in the future — please feel free to ask us more about them in your interview.

$\colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{Expanding our data coverage}}$

While a combination of machine learning and human data curation has allowed us to build up detailed profiles of over 50k companies, we know this doesn’t scale. Over the next few years, we’ll be going after many more public datasets. Our challenge is to get ML models that are both accurate and useful. Expanding the amount of data we have also brings other exciting challenges e.g. how can we scale our systems to cope with this extra data?

$\colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{Optimising our Advanced Search}}$

Our Advanced Search tool is one of the main ways our subscribers can find companies on our platform. It’s actually pretty complex to use and build. Essentially, it’s an interface that allows you to build a custom SQL query (including querying over relations). The output of this query is a custom JSON representation, so the frontend logic needs to be capable of building this up from these interactive components. This works pretty well right now across the data we currently have but, as we scale, who knows what challenges it will throw out.

$\colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{New data visualisations}}$

We’ve spoken about acquiring new data sets (right now, our sights are firmly set on trade and patent data), but how do we represent these alongside existing sets in a way that’s scalable? We also need to always make sure it is useful, useable and appealing to our clients. This ends up being quite the balancing act, so we’re always searching for exciting ways to present and visualise our data, both old and new.

$\colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{Delivering new products}}$

We’re best known for our platform, which we sell to our subscribers. We also think that there are some great opportunities to develop some new products over the next few years. The real challenge is making sure we’re always working on something valuable. We also need keep in mind: what other tech might we need to build these products? How much of this is off-the-shelf vs being built in-house? How do we know how much resource to dedicate to these untested products? In a resource constrained environment, we need to be thorough with how we approach these decisions.

$$ \colorbox{f9f7f2}{\color{202020}\Large\texttt{2. Modern, battle-tested tech}} $$