3. Driven by our mission
We’re making life profoundly better for
parents, children and caregivers, by
building the world’s best childcare service
4. About Koru Kids
Koru Kids is on a mission to improve childcare in London, making it easier and more affordable for
families to access flexible and high quality childcare. We are backed by fantastic investors, including top
VCs who’ve backed companies like Wonderbly, Thread and Appear Here, as well as the founders of
Gumtree and Entrepreneur First. We won ‘Best Technology’ at the Business Women Awards 2017, and
are currently shortlisted for a number of awards including Startups ‘Tech Business of the Year’.
If you want the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside people that will
challenge, inspire & scare you; keep reading.
About the team
We have a radically transparent and kind team culture. To say people at Koru Kids are passionate about
our mission is not PR bull, we all very much care about helping parents reintegrate into the workplace
(especially mums) and about improving the face of child development. We’re committed to working with
integrity, doing the right thing and building a company we are truly proud of. We’re growing super fast but
we also want to make sure that we are building a company on really solid foundations.
We work from a great private office space near Old St in central London. The office has a roof terrace,
showers, bike storage, free snacks and drinks, and a programme of social events.
5. Full Stack Ruby Developer
We’re on a mission to improve childcare in London, and looking for someone experienced, creative and friendly to join our team as our fourth engineer.
About the role
We’re building a marketplace that enables families to find and share high quality nannies. As an engineer on the Koru Kids team, you’ll be designing and building tech to make complex matching
problems a breeze, to give families and nannies a solution that just works, and to supercharge our nanny recruitment and training processes.
You’ll be working in Ruby for most of the backend, with Rails, PostgreSQL and Redis making up the majority of our core product. You’ll be using modern frontend tooling, with ES6 and Tachyons.
When it comes to shipping code, you’ll be sending pull requests and doing code reviews in GitHub, and checking that CircleCI is happy before anything goes live. You’ll mostly be deploying to Heroku,
with some heavy lifting on AWS. (That said, our priority is making sure we’re using the right tools for the job and we’re open to adding to or changing up our tech and tooling as appropriate.)
We’re continuously improving our product, building key features that will move the needle in a big way. Instead of an endless product roadmap, we run short development cycles to test assumptions
and make smart decisions quickly. We favour feature flags over staging environments and deploy to production as often as we need to; deployment cycles shouldn’t get in the way of delivering value.
As an engineer on the team, you’ll work closely with product and operations to find and build creative solutions for business problems and make sure we’re delivering the most value to our customers.
About you
You’re a mid-level or experienced generalist or backend web developer who thrives in small, fast-moving engineering teams.
Essential
Familiarity with web application development
Familiarity with relational databases and SQL
You take pride in writing readable, well-designed and well-tested software
You’re keen to pair program when appropriate, and generally enjoy a culture of code review
You’re humble, you lap up feedback, and you want to learn
You roll with it. You understand that startups are unpredictable environments, and are comfortable with a degree of chaos
You own it. You take responsibility for your work from start to finish
Not essential, but nice to have
Experience with Ruby on Rails
Familiarity with frontend development, including modern JavaScript frameworks and tooling
You practice test-driven development
A degree in Computer Science or a related field
Any of these profiles could be a great fit
Developer bootcamp graduate with at least one year of software engineering experience in industry
New graduate in Computer Science or related field and a couple of software engineering internships
Experienced software engineer with a number of years in industry
BENEFITS
Competitive salary (£40-£75k, or more depending on experience) and generous share options (0.1% - 1%).
6. UX Product Designer
We’re looking for either someone with background in UX but wants to move into a role that’s closer to
a Product Owner, or Product Owner who wants to get their hands dirty producing designs and running
research. We’re continuously improving our product, building key features that will move the needle in
a big way. Instead of an endless product roadmap, we run short development cycles to test
assumptions and make smart decisions quickly. We favour feature flags over staging environments
and deploy to production as often as we need to; deployment cycles shouldn’t get in the way of
delivering value. You’ll work closely with engineers and operations to find and build creative solutions
for business problems and make sure we’re delivering the most value to our customers.
The sorts of problems you’ll be tasked with solving are:
- How do we help families and nannies communicate better
- How do we ensure we’re making perfect family/nanny matches (like digital dating matching
algorithms)
- What are the biggest frustrations and anxieties of would-be nannies
- What does “good child development” look like and how can we deliver that using a combination of
humans and technology
We hope you’ll agree, these aren’t your run-of-the mill tech problems.
About you
You’ll seek to create incredibly useful, engaging and beautiful experiences, and will know how to
balance perfection with progress & learning. You’ll understand why we have KPIs and you’ll be able to
challenge them when you think we’ve got them wrong. Primarily because you understand how
smashing those KPIs relate to building the world’s greatest childcare service. Besides design, your
job is to make an undeniably positive impact on our company, our culture, our products, and our
customers.
Must have:
- Authenticity. We want you to be you, not the “work” version of you
- Extremely good critical thinking
- Experience in at least two of the following:
- product ownership
- interface design
- user research
- information architecture
- interaction design
- Experience with, and a passion for user-centred design
- Opinions on what makes for good/bad research for a given problem
- An analytical mind that uses empirical data as well as opinions to back up your arguments and fight
your cause
- Emotional intelligence
- High level of creativity and problem solving skills
Nice to have (you should have about ⅔ of the below):
- Experience working in an Agile/Lean environment with rapid prototyping and iterative development
- Experience with testing and analysis of users (both qualitative and quantitative) in order to gain
insight and inform design
- An analytical mind that uses empirical evidence as well as opinions to back up your arguments and
fight your cause
- Ability to reason by first principles
- A level of expertise that excites and scares us together with the desire to share your expertise
- Excellent writing skills
- The confidence to influence, share and collaborate early on in the design process
- The ability to do more with less. The desire to look for simpler but better solutions.
- A Brobdingnagian passion & belief in your own ideas but the humility to recognise when you’re
wrong
- An understanding of the pros and cons of Lean
- You love working with numbers and data. Excel is your friend. We love people who love analysis
- You’re a "Manager of One"
- The ability to do more with less. The desire to look for simpler but better solutions
If we had to sum it up in three words, they’d be “Smart, Kind, Creative”.
What you’ll be asked to do:
- Deliver outstanding user experiences
- Contribute to “what we should work on next” with good rationale behind your answers
- Conduct design reviews of the team’s output
- Design digital experiences from the problem out
- Run research to test ideas, problems, design and gather qual and quant insight.
- Be the voice of the user across the company
- Clearly and concisely present various stages of interface design development to the rest of the
company
- Contribute and build towards the overall happiness of the team
- Design journeys, services and experiences; not just pages, screens and components
- Extol the virtues of Lean UX throughout the entire business
- Ideate, sketch, wireframe, prototype, design and sometimes build your solutions
How will you be measured?
Ultimately, it comes down to three things, in order of importance:
- Your impact on our mission.
- The quality of output.
- Your contribution to Koru Kids culture.
Compensation: £45K – £65K, plus equity
8. Move fast
We respect each other’s time.
Many decisions and actions are
reversible. We make these decisions
fast, and then execute quickly.
9. Families first
We exist to serve our families.
In doing so, we also need to serve
the needs of our nannies.
We work hard to earn and keep
parents’ trust.
Whatever they care about, we do
too.
10. Simplify and focus
We value simplicity over
complexity, and we strive to
ruthlessly prioritise.
We say no to many things, so that
we can focus on the few that are
truly important and meaningful to
11. Teamwork
We bring together exceptional
individuals, but optimise for the
best team outcome.
There is no individual bigger than
the team, and we don’t tolerate
dickheads.
12. Transparency
We create an environment of trust and
psychological safety where we can be open
and honest with each other about realities
we face.
This allows us to have maximum context for
decision-making and risk-taking, and helps
us surface errors.
We operate ‘transparency by default’, and
have courageous conversations even when it
13. Disagree and commit
We welcome respectful challenge
because it refines our ideas and
helps us learn.
Everyone is obliged to speak up
when they disagree, but once a
decision is made we commit
wholly.
14. Humility
We want to constantly learn and
improve and therefore we are
humble, self critical, embrace
feedback, and are always open to
the possibility that we are wrong.
We continuously experiment and
seek perspectives and solutions
from outside our walls.