About Ocado Group
When our journey started, we were all about changing the way people shop for groceries. 20 years later, we’re developing our own ground breaking technology, opening multiple sites at an accelerating rate and engaging in exciting new business partnerships around the world!
Transforming an industry also means transforming the way we do business. As we continually develop new technologies and customer propositions, we’re looking for the Everyday Pioneers to lead us into the next stage of our evolution: enhancing our capabilities, inspiring our teams and developing new ways of working.
Changing the way the world shops, for good.
The Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) Edge Services
The Edge Services department is looking for a talented software engineer to join our ‘Insights and Automation’ team. The Edge department is responsible for the connectivity and edge compute infrastructure that provides the backbone for our international, robotics based, automated warehouses. Ocado Technology places a high value on team autonomy and encourages a fail-fast attitude. In Insights and Automation, you will be joining a relatively small, tight-knit team of well-rounded engineers; a team that formed a little over a year ago and has now well and truly hit its stride. You will have the opportunity to help design our solutions and shape our products from the earliest stages through to maturity.
What does the Insights and Automation team do?
Insights - all good decision-making is driven by reliable, meaningful and accurate data. Our mission is to identify and capture every bit of valuable data originating from our vast estate of IoT devices and network hardware across dozens of warehouses. Our pipeline sends it into a data lake in the cloud, and from there we build dashboards that give our stakeholders the insights they need on what is happening and why – enabling a better understanding of their products’ performance in the field.
Automation - we strive to reduce toil and improve reliability by automating the management of our on-premise hardware. User-friendly, cloud-based applications empower our stakeholders in the engineering teams, reducing time spent on day-to-day tasks and lessening dependence on specialist support from on-call engineers. Our applications are all developed in the context of an innovative IoT platform built on top of AWS Greengrass.
What languages and technologies do we use every day?
Languages - Python, Bash, SQL
Cloud technologies - BigQuery, Dataflow, PubSub, Looker, LookerStudio, AWS IoT
Tooling - Docker, Gitlab CI/CD, Fluentd, Grafana
Operating Systems - Linux (Ubuntu)
An Exciting Opportunity
When you have vast amounts of data and tens of thousands of devices deployed across the globe, all of it enabling one of the most innovative retail and grocery fulfillment systems, you’re faced with quite a challenge. Keeping it running, rolling out configuration changes, supporting on-site staff, ensuring quality of service and SLAs are met, and then digging into the data itself to understand how we can do things better, and enable our teams to support our clients faster and with more autonomy. It’s a challenge!
By its nature, this role is exciting and varied, involving a mix of technologies and problem domains. We don’t require you to be able to demonstrate experience in every technology we use – what we’re looking for is a strong baseline and a clear capacity to learn fast and develop new skills.
Open to junior applicants as well as more experienced engineers.
You’ll enjoy being part of the team if...
- You have a passion for high-quality software engineering and giving our customers the tools and insights they really need
- You can code in Python
- You enjoy working with data
- You’re highly collaborative, and keen to following software engineering best practices
- You value stopping to fix problems at the root, rather than using workarounds
- You actively question design decisions and proposed solutions, ready to take a step back if it isn't right, either for ourselves, for our productivity or for our users
- You like the idea of working in a smaller team with a strong culture of shared learning and shared decision-making
Kudos if...
- You have web development framework experience
- You have experience with data analytics and a knack for presenting data in informative and effective ways
- You have experience developing in cloud environments, especially AWS or GCP
- You have experience with containerization and microservices architectures
- You have some exposure to SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) practices