Chicory

Chicory is seeking an ambitious Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to join our team.

About Chicory

Chicory believes food should never feel like a chore. We build seamless digital tools that take care of fussy food problems like list-making and aisle-searching. Our path to purchase grocery platform makes recipes shoppable and helps brands reach consumers through innovative solutions. Today, Chicory’s shoppable recipe network reaches over 35 Million MUVs. Partners include leading publishers like Time Inc. and over 800 top recipe bloggers like Sally’s Baking Addiction and Half Baked Harvest. Through this platform, Chicory understands consumer grocery purchase habits, preferences and intent in real time. As such, Chicory has become a leading provider in marketing and advertising solutions for leading food brands like Mondelez, ConAgra and Chobani.

About the Team

Like most startups, Chicory is a fast-paced environment. We all wear multiple hats (sometimes literally!) and we iterate quickly to continuously add value for our users, partners, and thus our business. We understand how precious time is and how important it is to have pragmatic attitude towards decision making. We've even built our own in-house analytics tools to help us gather information about our product and inform our business strategies.

By placing an emphasis on using or building tools that make our engineers more efficient, we are able to manage an incredible amount of technical assets and complex systems with a small team. Often, the appropriate solution for a problem is one we're not familiar with and requires us to very quickly learn about new technologies or acquire new skills.

About the Role

As an engineer at Chicory, you’ll build new, awesome grocery shopping experiences. You'll use Chicory's analytics architecture to measure the improvement your work has on millions of users. We strongly believe in adding incremental value. Your work will reach users in a matter of days, if not hours, using our Continuous Deployment strategies.

As an early member of our team, you'll provide significant strategic and technical guidance and help us solve the many technical challenges still ahead. You'll have a direct impact on shaping the engineering culture and our roadmap. The experience you will gain will be unique and unmatched.

About the Technology

Our core product leverages cutting edge technologies in the fields of machine learning, natural language processing and big data analytics. Our systems process 100 million + data points a month, in near real-time. We use a multitude of technologies and have a multitude of problems to solve. Here is a quick snapshot of the current arsenal:
-Python / Django, PHP / Laravel, NodeJS / ExpressJS
-Postgres, Memcached, ElasticSearch, Redshift, DynamoDB, Hadoop/Hive, Tensorflow
-OpsWorks, Chef, Docker, CircleCI, Jenkins, CircleCI, NewRelic

Skills and Qualities:

Core Skills: We're looking for experienced, capable software engineers with a range of skills and rock solid fundamentals. The languages, frameworks, and tools you're familiar with matter, but more important is the range of exposure you've had across engineering disciplines.

Fast Learner: We don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. With a plethora of current technologies available on the market, and an ever-increasing rate of innovation, we need software engineers that thrive in this uncertainty and are committed to exploring and using the best technologies. This also means knowing when to use well-established vs shiny new cutting edge technologies.

Fearless: You're an engineering Navy Seal. You can get the entire job done on your own if needed, but as part of a unit you add a multiplier of value. Like a Navy Seal, nothing stands in your way. A bug in a third party library? No problem, fix it and contribute back to the community or figure out how to work around it. Can't use a managed cloud service because your apps needs an advanced feature or special customization? No problem, deploy and configure your own hosted version of that service.

Pragmatic: We certainly encourage engineering principles and best practices, but we also operate in an environment with significant time constraints. Understanding and balancing development velocity with technical debt is a critical skill and almost an art form. Knowing when to allow for more technical debt is as important as knowing when is the right time to clean it up.

Systematic & Organized: Building software systems require a tremendous amount of creatively AND attention to detail. We believe strongly that by virtue of the type of work we do, software engineers have to be extremely systematic. This affects your ability to delivery high quality systems and successfully troubleshoot complex technical issues.

Grit: Perhaps most importantly, we're seeking individuals who have the passion and perseverance to pursue long-term goals. If faced with having to learn a whole new engineering discipline, you have to be up for the challenge and have the desire and stamina to see it through.