Vend: N̶o̶w̶ Always Hiring

Vend is (Ed: always) hiring. Not just the regular replacement/upkeep hiring we’ve been doing for the last little while. We’re going big and growing our Product & Engineering team by 25%. The opportunities we’re opening up are rare in New Zealand, and I’m going to explain why.

Why Vend?

Vend’s mission is to create remarkable retail life. Amazon and Shopify have their visions about the future of retail, but we disagree with those visions. Retail isn’t just about data-driven consumption and shopping from home in your pyjamas. For us, retail is about society. It’s about people interacting in-person with each other, having unique experiences, and sharing the products they cherish in diverse stores on vibrant high streets.

The mission doesn’t stop with brick and mortar stores. We’ve built a team and a platform that we’re proud to call remarkable too. We learn from the best in the industry, literally: we travel worldwide to research how other SaaS companies work, and implement the best bits. You won’t find a software company in New Zealand (at scale) whose stack and process is more modern than ours.

Mix that Silicon Valley tech with kiwi culture, and I genuinely believe you get something truly special. We’d encourage you to come join a caring team who eagerly educate each other to be remarkable. Be a part of New Zealand’s burgeoning tech economy, and learn skills that will make you hyper-desirable in the inevitable tech future.

Why now?

Over the past few months we’ve made some tweaks to our team and process to prove that we’re operating at peak efficiency. By being super efficient and focussed, we’ve managed to keep producing all the great software our retailers need, but now it’s time to step it up a bit.

The market for retail software is still wide open, and Vend is a pivotal part of the ecosystem. We’ve got the support of Apple, Square, Xero, and multiple payments and banking partners worldwide. Now we just need to go a little bit faster. That’s where you come in!

Why you?

We’re looking for a diverse group of people to make our team better. We realise there’s bugger-all people in New Zealand who have built world-class SaaS software at scale, so experience in our process and platform is not a requirement (although if you do have this sort of experience, that’s super!).

Here’s the kind of people we’re looking for:

Software Developers

We’ve closed our graduate recruiting for 2017, so we’re not looking for fresh grads, but we’re keen to talk to a range of junior, intermediate, and experienced software developers. Ideally you’ve built some web-based applications and APIs (and who hasn’t these days right? Everything is an API!), and understand how modern software fits together. Front-end, back-end or both, we’re looking for everyone.

We’re not precious about language experience, but if you’re keen to know exactly what platforms we use, read the appendix below.

Apply to be a Software Engineer at Vend.

Designers

We’re looking for a couple of Product Designers to bolster our Product Design team. We’ve been working to elevate design in our company’s culture. Designers are now more involved in the everyday of product decisions than ever before, and for Vend to continue to deliver delightful products at the pace the Engineering team can deliver them, we’re going to need help from a few more holistic Product Designers.

Apply to be a Designer at Vend.

Product Managers

We’re looking for Product Managers to champion the needs of retailers, curate a roadmap, and relentlessly communicate a vision for the future to everyone (internal and external to Vend). Drawing upon the skills of cross-functional teams and with overall company strategy in mind, you’ll drive innovative initiatives from inception through to delivery, communicating the benefits and measuring the impact of the changes we make.

Apply to be a Product Manager at Vend.

Data Nerds

Do you have experience in this thing they’re calling “big data” and “data science”? Reckon you could take terabytes of Vend’s data and change the way everyday retailers do business? We’re keen to hear from you (job ad coming soon!).

For all the above, If you’re wanting to move from SF to New Zealand, we can help with visa requirements.

What now?

Apply online. Absolutely let us know about your experience and skills, but we’d love it if you could specifically include two things in your application:

• A couple of paragraphs explaining what you (specifically you, not your tech skills) would add to our team culture.
• The most interesting problem you’ve solved (or would solve if you could) with software.

Appendix: The detailed stuff

Some people care about what tech & process they’ll be using, so here’s a brief run-down of how we build Vend. If none of these words make any sense to you, that’s not a showstopper. We can teach you all about them.

Process

At Vend, cross-functional teams include Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers. These teams work together to create a roadmap that’s intended to meet our strategy and vision. The product, design and engineering leads work together to come up with the plan to deliver on those roadmaps. Once we have a plan, we work in 2-week increments (kinda like Scrum sprints) to deliver the plan, always iterating and reviewing as we go.

Occasionally we have regulatory or partnership deadlines, but the vast majority of the time we work to deliver value, not to hit deadlines. The atmosphere is collaborative, never combative, and we favour action over deliberation (almost) every time.

We build and deploy continuously (5 production deploys would be an extremely quiet day at Vend), and use a sophisticated feature flagging system to control what code is available to which retailers as we roll out new features. Every software engineer at Vend can push code to production.

Technology

Vend started out as a monolithic PHP app, but today it is a modern microservice architecture, comprised of 40-ish (and growing rapidly) small services that communicate with each other. We currently write microservices in Go and Java, and deploy them using Docker on Amazon’s ECS infrastructure. We also make extensive use of many other parts of AWS, including RDS, Lambda, Dynamo, and much more.

Our front-end stack is equally eclectic, with a lot of Angular, a little bit of Redux, and a rapidly growing library of design patterns and reusable controls. We favour modularity where it makes sense, and we’re lucky enough to be able to dictate the browser our retailers use (Chrome), so we can use modern front-end tooling without cross-browser concern.

We favour rapid selection and iteration of technology. The way new stacks and technology (like GraphQL or Lambda or Kubernetes) get adopted at Vend is usually by someone experimenting in their spare time, and demonstrating to the team at one of our regular lunch-n-learns. If the idea has merit and wide buy-in, then we adopt it in production (as in: the person proposing the tech will productionise it and look after it).