Thread

Our goal is to create a new default for how most men buy their clothes. We want to help people feel amazing about how they look. Men feel exhausted by crowded shops and overwhelmed by the millions of options online. Often they don't know what items will suit them the best. The experience of looking through a huge selection of generic clothes - not tailored to you in any way - is hugely frustrating. There has got to be a better way.

We’re rethinking shopping for the digital age by giving every person their own personal stylist to recommend clothes just for them. Our real, human stylists will send items that look incredible on them, and is in their budget, size, style, etc. We've also built a homegrown recommendation system to help it scale. Recommending clothes and outfits that are similar to a client's current style is fairly straightforward and can be achieved using current well-known recommendation algorithms. To wow our clients, we need to recommend items and outfits that push them out of their comfort zone, but in a way that educates and doesn't scare them.

One of our ancillary goals is to build one of the best engineering teams and cultures anywhere in the world. This means putting a lot of time into ensuring we only hire truly exceptional engineers, and creating the best working environment possible. We’re lucky to already have a number of exceptional engineers on the team which you’ll get to work alongside, learn from and no doubt teach. For example, our co-founder/CTO was formerly a lead engineer at Google and our technical architect is a core Debian developer. If you want to work somewhere where you’re learning from some of the best engineers around, this role would be a good fit.

Within the engineering team we review everything that goes into production, both to improve the quality of our code and to share knowledge between team members. We automate the checking of style so that code reviews can focus more on architecture and maintainability. This creates a natural tension with wanting to move quickly, which we try to address by reducing scope and maintaining code quality, rather than introduce code that will be a burden.

We maintain a backlog of tasks, based on user research, feedback and our vision for Thread. Engineers help shape the direction of a project from the beginning, and have input all the way through design, implementation and iteration.

Every Wednesday afternoon we work on non-roadmap tasks. Examples have included contributing to text-editor plugins that we use, migrating to Python 3, experimenting with React Native, improving the tools used by our stylists, and mentoring contributors from outside the engineering team on pull-requests.

Our engineers regularly contribute to open source as part of their job. We encourage contribution and community participation and we release our own open source projects on GitHub. We place a high value on learning and personal growth, so you’ll have time to learn new technologies in work time and attend conferences at the company’s expense. We also host a bimonthly meetup at our offices for engineers interested in startups called Many to Many.

We're backed by incredible people such as Andrew Jennings (former president of Saks 5th Avenue), William Reeve (founder of LoveFilm), Edgar Bronfman Jr (former owner of Warner Music), Errol Damelin (founder of Wonga), Guy Hipwell (former head of online at Harrods and Liberty), Shakil Khan (founding investor in Spotify), Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), Tom Hulme (design director of IDEO), Miriam Lahage (former vice president of fashion at eBay), start-up accelerator Y Combinator and many others.