Platform Engineer (DevOps)

About us

Food waste is a $1 trillion problem – costing the world over 1% of global GDP. We’re dead set on solving the problem and looking for people to help us achieve our mission. We, at Winnow, believe that food is far too valuable to waste, and that technology can transform the way we produce food. Our team is made of people who all share a passion for food and technology.

Winnow was founded in London in 2013 to help the hospitality industry prevent food waste through internet of things tools in the kitchen. We have worked with hundreds of sites and are operating in over 85 countries around the world supported by our offices in London, Dubai, Singapore, Romania and Chicago. We are a rapidly growing company with a strong base of clients who are rolling out our system globally. We have blue-chip customers including Accor Hotels, IKEA, IHG, Marriott, Compass Group and many others.

Winnow’s clients on average reduce waste by over 50% by value and sustain savings. Winnow has now worked with hundreds of sites to reduce food waste, including hotels, universities and schools, staff restaurants, event/hospitality kitchens, buffets, pubs, and high street restaurants. Where the system is permanently adopted, pre-consumer waste value is reduced by 50% - 70% with no detrimental impact to the perceived quality or value of the offer to their customers. This represents a typical improvement of food cost savings of 3% to 8%, commonly a 40%+ increase in profitability for operations.

As the global leader in addressing food waste, we are committed to continue pushing the envelope on what technology can do to solve this problem. Winnow Vision, our new artificial intelligence-based technology, is trained to automatically track all food waste thrown away. It has won awards at the World Economic Forum and has received tremendous enthusiasm from our clients and the industry. You can read more about it on our website and this article in Forbes.

Other recent accolades saw Winnow awarded a winner of Impact 50's most impactful companies to work for. You can read more about it here. Similarly, Winnow has been included in the Top 30 Best Small and Medium companies to work for in 2023 by undelucram.ro.

We are passionate about living our values and place them at the centre of everything we do. We are excited about like minded talent who share these values, joining us in our mission:

Equal parts head and heart. We’re both passionate and measured. We carefully balance the need for quick solutions and pragmatism with the ability to step back, take in the bigger picture and build for the long term.

Bravely honest. With each other, that means we’re a transparent organisation where healthy, respectful debate is encouraged. With our customers, we challenge them if we don’t think they’re achieving their goals, whether they be environmental or financial.

People of action. Done is better than perfect, and we learn by boldly doing then rapidly improving. We’re breaking new ground, so we know things might go wrong. But we judge ourselves and each other on our reaction and our resilience.

Bound by food. We’re a diverse bunch, but our belief in the value of food is the common thread in everything we do. With each other, we celebrate through our love and respect for food. With our customers, it means we work hard to develop creative tools to make it easy for chefs to value food.

Hungry and humble. Our product is revolutionary, our people are impressive, and we’re hungry for change. But, we’re just the catalyst for a bigger movement. We stay humble regardless of our success, and make chefs the heroes in this journey.

People and planet positive. We’re caretakers of the planet, helping to preserve and support it for now and the future. Our work already minimises the impact that the hospitality industry has on the planet, and we’re also committed to actively reducing our own footprint while doing so. We’re leaving the planet and its people better off than we found them.

This is an opportunity to join an exciting organisation and help us propel our growth at what are truly the most exciting and dynamic points in time in our business. You will work alongside a driven team who are motivated by building an exciting business and leaving the world a better place than we found it.

Requirements

About the role

As you’d expect with any fast-growing scale-up, you’ll find an opportunity to apply and use your deep knowledge of infrastructure and software delivery to design and improve Winnow’s internal development platform and enable our teams to deliver secure software at speed.

Key responsibilities:

You will collaborate with software engineering and the data science & research team to:

• Deploy, automate, maintain, and manage AWS cloud-based system to ensure our systems' availability, performance, scalability, and security.
• Build and maintain development platform and tools, improving the Software Development Lifecycle by making it simpler and easier for developers to deploy code to production.
• Recommend improvements for enhancing the performance of our systems.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex infrastructure and application deployment issues.

About you:

Education and experience

• You are likely to be degree-educated having completed studies in Computer science, computer engineering, information technology, or a related field.
• You have significant experience in the DevOps, Platform Engineering, or System Integration working models which will ideally include experience in a technology start-up or a professional services environment.
• Essential skills:
• AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Linux & Networking fundamentals.
• Proficiency in shell scripting (bash) and working knowledge of one or more programming languages (Python or Go preferable).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform desirable).
• Experience with container and container orchestration technologies (Kubernetes or ECS).
• Experience with CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Bitbucket, Jenkins, or similar).
• Desired Skills:
• Good understanding of databases such as PostgreSQL & MySQL.
• Configuration as code (Ansible).
• Proficient in Observability tools such as NewRelic/ DataDog or similar, ELK Stack and Grafana.
• Experience in operating a complex microservice-style system.

Our Technology

Technology is at the forefront of what we do, and the success of our company is based on our world-class technology and on finding solutions to real-world problems that have not been solved to date. Our current stack includes:

• Designing and manufacturing IoT ‘smart’ edge devices and expanding using Linux-powered devices on the field collecting data using cutting-edge technologies.
• AWS Cloud focused (with minor parts in GCP and Azure) managed by Terraform with Terragrunt.
• AWS ECS for containerised “microservice” workloads.
• EKS for many of our platform components, including ELK, Grafana, Apache airflow.
• Databases include Aurora Postgres + MySQL, Redshift, Timescale, Mongo, and DynamoDB.
• Apache airflow and AWS SageMaker for data science uses.
• On-prem data center for ML GPU workloads.
• BitBucket, Jenkins, SonarQube, New Relic, Docker, Terraform.
• JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket (Atlassian products), Agile team using Scrum or Kanban (each team chooses the best approach to drive results).

Personal attributes

• You are results-driven and can demonstrate how you have delivered effective solutions in a timely manner.
• You are comfortable taking ownership and accountability for your work whilst working effectively as part of a larger team.
• You have experience working as part of a global team and building positive relationships with internal and external individuals across borders.
• You have excellent attention to detail and a meticulous eye for identifying inconsistencies or inaccuracies in data. You take your time to get things right the first time.
• You are transparent and act with integrity at all times.
• Able to organise self, including effective scheduling, prioritisation, and time management skills, managing multiple tasks in parallel and completing tasks to tight deadlines.
• Ability to convince others to express point of view and gain acceptance and agreement of plans.
• Demonstrates excellent communication skills. You are a confident and articulate presenter. You communicate clearly in both written and spoken language. You listen attentively; you process and comprehend what you hear. You are also confident enough to ask questions and clarify ambiguous points.
• Track record of identifying problems, analysing options, and deploying sound decision-making skills.
• Motivated and curious, you love absorbing new information and are able to reliably recall and figure out how to rapidly apply it. You have the courage, when appropriate to learn new technology rather than sticking to what you know already.

Our shared values

• You are both passionate and measured. You carefully balance the need for quick solutions and pragmatism with the ability to step back, take in the bigger picture, and build for the long-term.
• You are transparent in your approach and enjoy healthy, respectful debate. You work hard to build open and honest collaborative relationships.
• You get things done and seek to continually improve. Your customers want you on their team.
• You are passionate about the value of food and are committed to the fight against food waste.
• You are humble in approach and quick to pitch in if you see someone struggling.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary 

• Meal tickets - 35 RON per working day
• 2 Wellness hours per month plus a 274 RON gross monthly wellness allowance or the option to swap the wellness allowance for a 7Card subscription 
• 25 days of paid vacation time in addition to national holidays, plus the option to buy a further 5 days annual leave 
• Company part-funded private health insurance and eye care allowance
• Life insurance (3 times base salary) 
• Company stock options package 
• Eligible for discretionary annual bonus
• Employee Assistance Programme - 24/7 helpline for your wellbeing
• Learning and development allowance of 1,730 RON annually 
• Hybrid way of working - we’re all in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Company provided breakfast & snacks on office days
• Early Finish Fridays - log off at 3 PM on a Friday if you have completed your tasks by then
• Our own office space with a great working environment 
• You will love what you do – waking up every day solving one of the biggest social problems of our generation - food waste
• Committed team members with broad experience who share a common passion to build a world class business