Backend Engineer - Product Data

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world’s leading brands and stores. We are a scale-up business, combining an agile mentality with a proven business model and over a decade of experience. This provides a balance between foundations and structure, and autonomy and pace.

At Lyst, we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn’t, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better decisions and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper. Lyst has raised over $160m from leading investors including Accel, Balderton, Molten Ventures, Fidelity International, and LVMH.

The Role

Lyst is looking for a Software Engineer to join our Product Data team. The engineer will help us build upon and improve our product data pipeline, which is responsible for ingesting thousands of items per second into our catalogue of millions of products.

You will work in a fast-paced environment to help improve retailers' onboarding onto the Lyst platform. It is crucial for our customers and partners that the quality of the retailer’s data is accurate, precise, and up-to-date. At Lyst, all roads start from retailer data, and other teams rely on the quality of data we ingest.

You will work within an inclusive development team to help build upon existing systems and contribute to the ongoing performance improvements of the whole product data pipeline. The team will focus on improving the systems involved in onboarding new retailers to Lyst. This will, in turn, improve the customer experience by diversifying our catalogue and allowing customers to see new retailers and trends on Lyst even quicker!

Our onboarding with Product Data is focused on helping you succeed by building relationships first.

Within the first three months, you will be able to:

• Contribute to every part of our system, tests, documentation, as well as code and process.
• Ensure the stability of our system by improving the monitoring tools we use.
• Write resilient code that is well tested (unit, integration, etc.) and quality controlled.
• Engage in code reviews to ensure pragmatic code makes it to production.
• Be curious —not just the code, but the architecture of our platforms and everything that makes them work and the product.
• Participate in all team ceremonies and have direct input in the team's ways of working and (sometimes with donuts)
• Gain expertise over our tools and services: Python, Docker, Github Actions, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, etc.

This is a high-trust, supportive, and collaborative environment where you will have plenty of opportunities to really help make an impact on your team and the wider company. We value attitude as much as we do direct experience—we want to hire people to grow into the role and beyond.

About the team:

• Python is our bread and butter (sold separately).
• We use Docker and Kubernetes to manage our production services.
• We use Github Actions for continuous integration and deployment. Lyst deploys new changes to production more than 500 times a month.
• The Product Data team is one of Lyst's fundamental teams, and the data we manage is critical for the business. We have a strong relationship across the rest of the organisation, and almost all of Lyst engineering uses our services. 
• We maintain over 20 services and libraries with a team of 4 engineers and a product manager.
• We care about collecting metrics to measure our impact to ensure we’re focusing on the right things and track our progress towards our quarterly goals.

• Experience with building and maintaining Python microservices and libraries.
• Ready to contribute to an inclusive and positive working environment for everyone
• Able to communicate clearly and be humble when sharing ideas with everyone on the team
• Capable of writing highly resilient code and doing iterative development, balancing speed to ship and long term maintainability.
• Always looking to improve our platform, both infrastructure and code, and has a great curiosity in how everything works (or should not work). 

If you’ve programmed in a different language and have not worked with Python before, that’s OK. Knowing how to code is a transferable skill. Equally, if you’ve never used AWS before and have experience with an alternative cloud provider, that’s OK too. There’s time to learn on the job; a supportive, knowledgeable team will help you. Showing eagerness and willingness to learn is always a great trait.

We believe that having a curious mindset and your ability to learn to do the job are more important than a checklist of must-haves.

• Our Ways of Working: We all come into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.
• Time Off: In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
• Competitive Family Leave Package: This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.
• Clothing Benefit: We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service.
• Private Healthcare: Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start.
• Training Allowance: We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.
• Pension Scheme: Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.
• Eye Tests and Vouchers: Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.
• Cycle-to-Work Scheme: Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them.
• Transport Season Ticket Loan: Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.
• Social Events: Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.

We want to build a world where fashion works for everyone, and we want teams that are just as inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture at Lyst. We recognise and celebrate the value and impact diversity brings to our company and are committed to ensuring this is a consistent focus, for which we are held to account. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this role. We are happy to talk about flexible working arrangements.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Lyst we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.