Engineering

 

Engineering careers at Kudos

At Kudos, we’re building tools to help more people understand and use the latest research from around the world. Every year, billions are spent on funding research, and yet the time it takes for this knowledge to be applied can be decades. Kudos is changing this by helping researchers communicate more effectively – not only with each other, but also with those that can apply their work to progressing global health, wealth and happiness. 

Our Engineering team is responsible for delivering our exciting product roadmap. We develop both the product and our skills in a collaborative environment, and we'd love you to join us.

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We all come from different backgrounds

We’re not looking for a degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering. We have team members with degrees in fields that might surprise you! If you enjoy working collaboratively, learning new things, and having a chance to shape new features from the very first ideas right through to rolling them out for thousands of people to use, we’d love to hear from you.

We use exciting new technologies

Kudos relies on a varied set of tools and technologies. Here are some of them!

  • JavaScript/TypeScript and Angular for our frontend microservices
  • Go for our modern backends
  • Kubernetes and Docker to run and orchestrate our services in the cloud
  • Elasticsearch, MySQL, and Google Cloud Datastore for storing and searching data
  • Ruby for some older parts of our product
  • Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services as our cloud platforms

We don’t necessarily expect you to have worked with all or any of these previously, and we provide opportunities for all our software engineers to learn our tools with the support of the whole team. The tools and technologies of our trade are constantly evolving, so we think it’s much more important that you’re enthusiastic to update your skills and apply what you’ve learnt to new languages, frameworks, and problem domains.

Each team member works on every part of the system, from the front end, to the back end, to managing our infrastructure. If you’ve previously focused on only one of these areas, this is a great chance to branch out!

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We’re continuously refactoring how we work

We own our processes and procedures, and are empowered to change them and decide how we work together as a team. We have regular retrospective sessions where any team member can highlight our challenges and successes, so we can continuously refactor the way we work as an engineering team. Our retros help us to create opportunities to develop our own skills, support each other, and build a fun, friendly, and productive place to work.

We deliver new features and improvements continuously

We use agile frameworks to guide our product and engineering processes, and are committed to cultivating a culture of continuous iterative improvement. We follow continuous delivery practices to deploy our platform, and love staying up to date with current software technology and processes, drawing on the collective experiences of the industry to pick the right tools and techniques.

Location and benefits

  • We’re a fully distributed company, with employees around the UK. You can be located anywhere in the country where there's internet access! (Please note that you must hold the right to work in the UK.)
  • We offer flexible working (with a limited set of core hours), so you can arrange your work day around your life.
  • We have occasional in-person meetings (we’re still figuring it out as Covid-19 restrictions ease, but currently we expect to have these a few times a year). We’ll pay for your travel and accommodation.
  • We offer 25 days’ annual leave, plus bank holidays (we follow the bank holidays for England and Wales).
  • We offer a pension plan with Royal London, with company contributions.
  • We offer time every week to dedicate to learning new skills and technologies, as well as funding for things like courses and attending conferences.

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How to apply

To apply for any of our engineering team positions, or if you’d like to ask any questions, contact our Technical Lead, Alex Reid, at alex.reid@growkudos.com. Applications should include your CV and a short covering note saying what caught your attention about the role, as well as any of your experience and skills you’d like to highlight, plus your salary expectation.

We embrace diversity, and all applicants will be considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, belief, sexual orentation, gender identity, age, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability. We particularly encourage members of underrepresented groups in software engineering to apply. 

Our interview process

We start with a short (under an hour) initial online interview so we have a chance to get to know each other, followed by a small coding task (which you can work on at your own pace, and shouldn’t take more than an hour or two).

We then have a 2–3 hour full interview (conducted online) where you’ll have a chance to meet more of the team, as well as chat about how you approach software engineering. We’ll discuss the coding task you completed, as well as have a collaborative design session where we’ll design a system together on a virtual whiteboard. 

We won’t ask any brain teasers – we’re interested in software engineering, not how many piano tuners there are in Chicago! And we won’t ask you to write code on a whiteboard.

Open Positions

We don't have any positions we're actively hiring for at the moment. If what you've seen on this page really speaks to you, please get in touch – we're always happy to get the chance to know likeminded engineers, and we can advise you about any opportunities we have in the pipeline!

Note that no additional recruitment agencies will be considered for any of our open positions.