Senior Frontend Engineer (Warsaw)

To reimagine technology to transform analytical decision-making, helping our customers make smarter decisions faster.

Who we are

The most interesting scaleup you haven’t yet heard of! Our product, Renew, lets users build and iterate complex mathematical models with the small, sparse and fragmented datasets that are used to drive critical decisions in many businesses. Such models are used to help answer questions like:

• What are the chances that SpaceX’s next launch will fail?
• How often will a company like TalkTalk have a cyber data breach?
• What would happen to the property in Silicon Valley if there was an earthquake?
• What are the chances of Kanye West cancelling his sell-out tour?

This sort of analysis has recently been neglected in favour of big data/analytics, but we are on a mission to change this. Our product has applications across multiple industries – we are focusing on speciality insurance to start with, but we believe our software has far further reach (including beyond the financial sector).

Why is this role special?

• You will be an early member of a frontend team that will scale by 15+ people over the next 12-18 months
• You will encounter Hard* engineering challenges and will make critical, load-bearing decisions that will shape the future of hx
• You will have a direct, tangible impact on the entire future of a post-Series A scaleup

* capital ‘H’ intentional – we do some cool stuff you won’t see elsewhere

What does Engineering mean at hx?

Our Engineering team is front-and-centre in our mission to help our customers make smarter decisions faster. Building Renew has challenged us to solve many interesting problems, including:

• How to run arbitrary customer code securely, whilst controlling for indeterminism without accidentally trying to solve the halting problem
• How to produce a rich web-based development environment complete with IDE, version control, package management, tests, deployments and hosting... For non-developers
• How to produce a UI that’s familiar to Excel users without actively tying us to Excel

We’ve historically solved these problems with hard work and smart thinking, but we've reached the ‘two pizza limit’ and need to move from ‘zero to one’ in places and ‘one to many’ in others so we can confidently solve more problems in parallel - problems like:

• How will we reach our ‘north star’ of deploying on-demand whilst ensuring the safety, security and correctness of our product?
• How do we safely move from one team to many and how should we divide the product domains?
• How should we optimise our systems to run larger models, more quickly, for less overall cost?
• Which systems need to be rewritten, refactored, removed or simply polished?
• How do we produce a UI component toolkit for our users that looks great and works brilliantly – irrespective of the weird and wonderful ways they’re assembled

Who are we looking for?

You will need:

• Deep knowledge of React and TypeScript
• A passion for good, clean, elegant code
• Experience building large and advanced user-centric web applications
• Modern Frontend tooling (npm, yarn, Webpack, Create React App, Babel, PostCSS, esLint etc)
• (X)HTML, HTML5, CSS3 (ideally with Flexbox)
• Good knowledge of fundamental Computer Science and Software Engineering principles (Algorithms, Data Structures, Complexity, Design Patterns, Architecture)
• A good general understanding of modern software development/deployment principles:
  • Version control (Git)
  • TDD/BDD

We additionally appreciate:

• Modular CSS methodologies and styled components
• Experience in building custom components to visual complex data
• A ‘DevOps’ mindset – you build it, you own it
• Knowledge of adjacent and/or complimentary domains such as platform, backend, product, reliability, security and/or quality
• Community contributions through meetup/conference talks, blogs or open-source
• Prior B2B SaaS experience

What do we offer?

• Competitive salary + very staff-friendly EMI share options
• £5,000 annual learning & development allowance
• Private healthcare (inc. dental) insurance through Vitality
• Enhanced pension scheme through Penfold
• 33 days annual leave (inc. public holidays)
• Top-spec equipment (laptop, mechanical keyboards, screens, etc)
• Regular remote hackathons, lunch & learns, socials and games nights
• Team breakfasts and lunches, snacks, drinks fridge, fun office @ The Ministry
• Huge opportunity for personal development and mastery as we grow together
• Annual team trip somewhere warm!

What’s next?

hx is different and so is our hiring process. We want to see you at your best, so we let you customise the major stages – essentially a “choose your own adventure” hiring process that adapts to your individuality.

• Initial call with our Talent team to kick things off
• Introductory call with your future manager (with your choice of questions)
• Practical skills assessment with your future colleagues
• Meet the team (with your choice of who) + Meet the CTO + Meet the CEO
• We offer!

Diversity @ hx

We are committed to diversity and equal opportunity. We’re a talented and high-energy, but low-ego and kind team who believes that the more inclusive we are, the better our work and culture is. We are not yet where we want to be in terms of balance, but it is our mission to build a team that represents a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and we are working hard towards that goal.