Mumsnet

Our story

Mumsnet is the UK’s biggest website for parents. Our one purpose is to make their lives easier.

We want to be the first choice for online advice for parents & parents-to-be and the number one partner for brands wanting to understand, reach and engage with parents.

We run some of the busiest forums in Europe, with over 14m monthly uniques. Our users offer each other advice and support 24/7 and there are more articles, bloggers, videos, events and campaigns than on any other platform. We want to be indispensable to parents, plus a great place to work.

We’ve grown steadily and sustainably over the last 18-odd years and we have every intention of carrying on. We’re building a high-performance, collaborative and agile work environment. We believe that mistakes are human, but learning is divine. We put purpose before profits, we’re committed to diversity and equality.

We don't just want to hire the best people we want to retain them.

2019 represents a crucial year of transformation for Mumsnet from a tech, product and data perspective.

Engineering at Mumsnet

We think it’s a really interesting time for engineering at Mumsnet as we’re rebuilding our platforms from the ground up and introducing new technologies to bring exciting new features to our millions of users.

We’re moving from a Java monolith to microservices written in PHP and Ruby. We’re pushing lots of functionality into the front end using Vue.js and JavaScript. Behind the scenes we’re on AWS, running all services in Docker containers and we’re moving to serverless wherever we can.

CI/CD is handled by CircleCI with automated Docker builds and deployments to staging. Our mobile apps are native iOS / Android builds which we will be replatforming with ReactNative.

We love agile and work in two week sprints. We believe in build, measure, learn and try things out with hackdays and PoC’s. We also believe it’s great to be continuously learning and improving our skills, that’s why we dedicate Friday afternoons to personal projects and learning time.

Our values

Collaborative. We are team players, and take a highly engaged and interactive approach on our tech team we work in cross-functional squads, we pair program, and we prefer communication over documentation.

Flexible. We are solutions driven and pragmatic. We love the startup approach, releasing as often as we can, testing with users and learning from their feedback.

Straight-forward. We give honest feedback delivered kindly and do the right thing, even when no one is looking. Our team is democratic and we believe every voice matters.

Driven. We work hard, take ownership and follow through. We hate Silos and believe in Amazon’s “You build it, you run it” approach. It gives total ownership over our code and makes us better engineers.

Lean. We have an agile, test and learn approach and we treat the company's money like our own. We love running experiments and learning from user feedback before we invest to engineer for scale.

Our recruitment process

We are flexible and inclusive in our approach to recruitment.

We want to make our hiring process thorough but also relatively painless. We don’t find hundreds of rounds of interviews constructive for either you or us and we endeavour to give you as full a flavour as possible of what it’s actually like to work at Mumsnet.

• Technical phone call with an engineer (30min) - this will cover the basics in terms of your background, career history and experience, and gives us an opportunity to explore your technical expertise.
• Task or code reviews (in your own time) - For junior positions we give you a fun and simple challenge which will be reviewed by two of our engineers in 24-73 hours upon submission and for senior positions we ask that you give us some of your best code to review.
• On-site interview (2 hrs) - you get to meet the team, engineers and non engineers alike, plus have a Values Interview with one of the Senior Leadership Team