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Job description

At Shoji, we're making private data useful and keeping useful data private.

We’re building the data sharing infrastructure of tomorrow to help businesses safely unlock the value of their most sensitive digital assets. The Shoji platform lets multiple teams or organisations solve problems, generate insights and even perform machine learning on private datasets, without ever moving or exposing the raw data.

We’re motivated by what we enable for others. By unlocking access to data previously beyond reach, there’s no limit to the use-cases made possible. Whether it’s banks being able to improve access to credit, doctors being able to make better diagnosis predictions or governments being able to more effectively allocate resources, we passionately believe that by protecting privacy, we can power the innovations that are most important to society.

Who we are, our values and what we look for

Founded in March 2021 by a team of statistical machine learning PhD students from Imperial College, we’ve already received over £1.5m of backing from Entrepreneur First and a leading VC.

We’re obsessed with technological progress, but only when it respects privacy. This dependency defines the way that we work. We value ambition, curiosity and proactivity, without compromising on transparency, integrity and humanity.

We’re looking for people who constantly strive for improvement, in their own work and others’; people who prioritise product, with a bias for action; people with a hunger for solving hard and important problems, fast; people who are always looking to learn, not to be taught.

Why being a software engineer at Shoji is different

• There’s an abundance of opportunity here. Whether you want to be more customer facing, or have ownership of the products you build, or even contribute outside of your main role, we’ll encourage and enable you.
• We work in small, highly-capable teams (sometimes breaking Bezos’ two-pizza rule, but only because we are gluttons for good pizza!)
• Meritocracy is one of our founding principles. You will always get full credit for your contributions. So, if you’re currently stuck in a role where you’re going unnoticed or your boss is taking all the credit, come and join us for a better life.
• We encourage regular, omni-directional feedback so we can all improve and ensure everyone is fine and dandy.
• We can promise you a huge amount of autonomy, but also support from other brilliant minds.
• Minimum viable bureaucracy: no unnecessary meetings taking your time away from building.

What you should know before you consider applying

We steer clear of rigid requirements because we want to hire the best people for the role, regardless of their background, and that’s impossible to define on paper. It doesn’t matter if you’re fresh out of university, or if you’ve honed your technical skills without pursuing further education.

We love our people T-shaped. As long as you’re a fast learner and brilliant engineer, we generally don’t care about experience with specific technologies.

You don’t have to be a privacy enthusiast right now, but we’ll bet you that soon after you join, you’ll become one!

Tasks

As one of the early software engineers, you’ll have the opportunity to play a key role in the success of Shoji. Your responsibilities will evolve with the business, but here are just some of the things we’ll need you for:

• Leading the architectural design and implementation of the global, multi-cloud infrastructure that underpins our platform.
• Owning the critical infrastructure. Maintaining it, and maximising uptime.
• Ensuring that data is flowing across Shoji’s infrastructure securely and efficiently, and heavily optimising where possible.
• Early on, setting up a smooth development pipeline.
• Working closely with the CTO and other lead engineers to define the development roadmap and hire future devs.
• Longer term, you’ll be expected to mentor and coach the more junior members of the team as we grow.

Requirements

Strong signs that you should apply

• You know AWS/GCP/Azure products like a Pokémon fan knows the Pokédex (and most importantly, you’ve actually used most of them too).
• Docker and K8s are your bread and butter. I guess that makes Terraform your board and Ansible/Puppet/etc. your spreads. Basically, you love containerisation.
• To use microservices or not to use microservices, that is the question. You’ve got the expertise to justify a good answer.
• You understand why, how and when to implement distributed systems. You are the conductor, they are your musicians.
• You pride yourself on server uptime to the point where you need, or are close to needing, two hands to count the number of 9s under your belt.
• Lack of CI/CD is one of your pet peeves.
• You love being hands on and throwing yourself into code. If your current/last role was senior then you should have learned to delegate, but you should wish you could get back to being more involved again.

The ideal person has

• A demonstrable, exceptionally strong engineering background. Open-source contributions are always a plus.
• Strong DevOps skills, and enough sysadmin and data engineering experience to be self-sufficient.
• A solid understanding of networking from a software perspective.
• Familiarity integrating data engineering and ML pipelines.
• Experience mentoring and managing teams.
• Experience with confidential computing environments (TEEs).

Benefits

• £70-100k salary based on experience.
• Competitive employee stock options so you can share in the company's success.
• ‍ ️ Flexible work arrangements: both hours and location.
• 28 days holiday and we’ll give you £1k in holiday vouchers to take that time off.
• £2k equipment budget so you can work with the tools you love.
• Private health insurance.
• Paid maternity and paternity leave.
• Free coffee/drinks in the office.
• Who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Team lunches are free on Friday.
• Pizza oven in the office.

At Shoji, we're looking for people with drive, grit and initiative. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description – it may even set you apart. It should take us 2 weeks to go through the hiring process and reach a decision.

1) Simple first step: send us your CV and an optional cover letter. Bonus points for providing your GitHub profile, or alternatively, including summaries and your involvement capacity in a few recent technical projects. \[under 5 mins]

2) Meet and greet call: let’s get to know each other. This is an opportunity for us to learn a bit about you, and for you to learn about Shoji. \[30 min call]

3) Technical interview: no brain teasers or rare-CS-algo-that-you’ll-never-use questions here. These questions will be practical and relevant to the role. This is an opportunity for us all to learn what it’s like to work together. \[1 hour remote interview]

4) Take-home task: at our discretion. We’ll reimburse you for your time, which should be no more than 2–3 hours. This is an opportunity for us to get a better understanding of how you work and what your work looks like with less pressure than the technical interview. \[2–3 hours in your own time]

5) Discussion interview: we’ll go over the technical interview (and take-home task if necessary) and also discuss all the non-technical parts we’re interested in hearing about, including past projects. \[30 mins – 1 hour call]

6) Final Interview: you’re almost there! Having already demonstrated outstanding technical competency, this interview will be more behavioural. Duration will be correlated with your level of experience, in separate sessions if appropriate. \[1–3 hours worth of calls]

7) Final decision: we make you an offer if we’re convinced you’re the right person.

At Shoji, we’re ridiculously passionate about what we do, and are firm believers in our success being dependent on our people. We're fully committed to creating a diverse team of exceptional people. We embrace differences and hire purely based on merit, giving equal consideration to all applications, regardless of gender, background, race or any other characteristic that has absolutely nothing to do with competency.