My first year as a Software Engineer at Plum Guide
Hi, I’m Lewis and I’m one of the engineers here at Plum Guide. I started over a year ago, and in that time I've learned a lot about what makes Plum great.
My background
I graduated from University in 2014 with a degree in Applied Computing, with the sole ambition not to be a Software Engineer... I held no aspirations to be the stereotypical basement engineer who avoided all human contact.
After going through a few interviews I realised this might not be the reality, so I started an engineering internship at a hyper growth start up (and now market leader) called Epos Now, where I spent 3 months being introduced to the industry and start up culture.
When the internship ended, I was offered a full-time role and rose through the ranks over 3.5 years, to eventually lead projects for global expansion. Leading and delivering this project alongside a sterling team included taking a UK-based platform and making it fully compatible with the US retail/hospitality market, and it firmly remains one of the highlights of my career.
With ambitions to recreate these successes elsewhere, I began my search for a similar existing company in a different industry to hopefully use some of my experiences and continue to learn a whole lot more.
The hiring process (and why I decided to join)
There were a few combining factors when I was looking for a new role: an ambitious company, personal responsibility, unlimited learning opportunities and a team that truly cared about the product they were building.
Plum's tagline alone oozes the ambition everyone in the company has — “Find the top 1% of homes in the world”. That's no mean feat by anyone’s standards!
The hiring process started with a short phone call with Imran, our Head of Tech, where we got to know more about each other. He told me all about Plum’s ambitions, the team structure and the stack being used.
After that came the face-to-face interview, which was run like a normal day at Plum: I was presented with a series of problems, and between me and a couple of their engineers, we worked to design a solution. At the end of the exercise, they explained how they solved this same problem, so at the very least I would have left knowing something new and could take those new ideas with me.
The final part of the interview was about meeting people from the wider business. I met with a couple of senior engineers, and showed them a project I had been working on in my spare time. I also had a good chat with Doron, our CEO, who wanted to find out a bit more about me and answer any of my questions.
One of things that convinced me happened by accident: before the final stage of the interview, I was asked if I didn’t mind waiting 5 more minutes whilst the Head of Tech and a senior engineer finished debugging and fixing a production issue. That was exactly what I was looking for; a team where everyone got involved and took ownership when things weren’t going according to plan.
After this experience, it was a no-brainer where I wanted my next job to be.
Working at Plum
The best thing about working here is probably being surrounded by some of the most intelligent, talented, ambitious and helpful people every day. This encompasses everyone in the company, not just the product and engineering team.
Everyone's ideas and opinions are valued, and you are given the opportunity to put your ideas into practise with the support of everyone around you. Help and assistance is never more than a question away and you’ll never stop learning.
Some cool things I've done
When I first started at Plum, homes were available in two cities. A few months later 4 more cities were announced, and that meant scaling everything, from hiring across the business to the internal tools we all use.
At the time, releasing a new city was a lot of work across all teams. We helped create a playbook to make the process leaner and easier, and we've since used it to prepare for the launch of 6 more cities. That meant the massive task of refining the tech side to make it even more automated. I still remember the euphoria when the new cities went live... A fantastic team achievement!
The second is a personal accomplishment. In the last few months, I have been the lead engineer for a massive solidification of the finance platform nestled within the Plum system. I've always had an interest to work in more than just building the platform, so I took the opportunity to work alongside stakeholders from customer service, sales and finance to rethink their processes and build a product that made their lives easier. It now captures 10 times as much information as previously.
On the engineering side, all the new functionality has been built into two .Net Core micro-services, and large swathes of existing functionality were re-written with increased test coverage.
This project is far from complete and we'll continue to incrementally improve it, but it is in a much better shape, and has helped to set a precedent for future projects.
What the future holds
Firstly, I find expanding into new cities and territories really exciting. We're working on a "city printing machine" that will allow us to launch a new city with a click of a few buttons (instead of weeks of engineering work), but we will never be able to account for all the intricacies and challenges each new city presents.
Opening new cities also means hiring people from all over the world and all walks of life. Each of them totally unique, but as scarily ambitious and talented as the last.
The other thrilling thing about Plum is all the advancements in tech we're planning. Going from a single monolith application to a micro-service architecture is no walk in the park, and with something as abstract as this concept there's no blueprint that works for all scenarios.
It’s a complete journey of discovery, trial and error, and a great opportunity to learn, read, experiment and make a real impact on the future architecture of our platform. With the ability to scale the platform, Plum can continue marching on to vet every home on the planet to find the top 1%!
(We are hiring — if you like the sound of working with us, check out our live roles — https://careers.plumguide.com/)
