Boba
Senior Software Engineer
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About Us
Based in Chiswick, London, Boba Commodities has traded commodity futures since 2013. The point of the profit is what we do with it: investing into community or planet enhancing businesses around the world that share our values.
That isn't a page on our website. It's why the company exists. We're carbon negative and we double-offset our footprint, backdated to our first day of trading. We don't trade fossil fuels.
We are a proprietary trading firm, meaning we trade our own capital not client or investor money. This frees us to decide what we do, how we do it and when we do it.
What it's actually like here
We're a small team, so what you build gets used. Write something on Tuesday, watch a trader use it on Wednesday.
The salary is £70,000 to £80,000: based on years of relevant software engineering experience. We're not able to provide Skilled Worker visa sponsorship for this role so you must therefore have the unrestricted right to work in the UK for the duration of your employment.
Four values, and we live them, not laminate them:
- 80/20: We'd rather ship something good on Tuesday than something perfect next month.
- Adapt & Evolve: We won't get it right first time, but we’ll learn. We're fine saying that out loud.
- Best Ideas Rise To The Top: The best idea wins, not the most senior one. In our meetings, senior people speak last on purpose.
- Care Personally: Everyone here is a person, not a resource. We care about our output because someone next to us relies on it. We have each other’s backs.
These core values are intrinsic in our culture and in everything we do.
What we put behind you
A professionally qualified coach, from day one and a tenured Engineer as mentor. A book a month for self-development. Support for certifications. 39 days holiday, taken whenever you want. An allowance for whatever gets you moving e.g. gym, jiu-jitsu, running club.
If you're looking to solve real business problems with code, that's the point of this role. We'll teach you the markets. You bring the engineering solutions.
How we work
Small team, low process, high ownership
- We value pragmatism over perfection (80/20 mindset)
- We prioritise impact over activity, we roll up our sleeves and get it done
- We expect people to challenge ideas and contribute to better solutions
- We set high standards, but we don't expect perfection. You'll make mistakes as you learn; what matters is taking ownership, learning from them and improving. You'll get direct, timely feedback and we expect you to give feedback too.
What you will be doing…
You'll join a pod of about six engineers building technology that directly supports our trading business. You'll:
- Bring your experience to design, build and improve Python and SQL applications used by our Trading, Finance and Operations teams, mentoring our junior engineers along the way.
- Work on real features, automation and business problems from day one.
- Design and write clean, maintainable and well-tested production software through peer code review and feedback.
- Investigate bugs and technical problems, break complex problems into manageable steps.
- Work directly with the people using the software so you understand the why behind what you're building.
- Contribute ideas about how our technology and ways of working could be better.
- Take ownership of increasingly complex pieces of work as your knowledge and skills develop.
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We need someone who has…
Read these one at time, not as a checklist. If some are missing, message us anyway….
- 4-5 years of industry experience developing production software in Python and SQL, ideally on cloud infrastructure
- Relational Databases and core database concepts such as, querying, schemas, and transactions
- Strong working knowledge of Git processes (branching strategies and repo management)
- Strong working knowledge of designing, building or consuming REST APIs, with a solid understanding of HTTP methods, status codes, request/response handling, and JSON.
- A structured approach to designing and building software solutions – you can explain how you narrowed a problem down, what you ruled out and how you knew you had found it.
Things you will have the opportunity to learn and work with…
- Integrating software with productivity tools such as Excel, Slack, and others.
- Designing and building low-latency trading systems, comparable infrastructure or related operational/trading processes.
- Modern front-end technologies such as REACT, typescript or next.js
- Integrating applications with databases such as Postgres and MongoDB through code
- AWS services, including but not limited to EC2, Lambda, Aurora, S3
- Data visualization tools and technologies to create effective dashboards and reports
- Implementing and improving methods such as DevOps and CI/CD tools and best practices and working in teams using these methods.
- Container technologies such as Docker and container orchestration platforms such as Amazon ECS or Kubernetes.
- Event-driven and real time data architectures, including stream processing technologies such as Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis.
- Monitoring, logging and observability tooling such as DataDog or Grafana
- Workflow or data orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow
- Strong focus on software quality, maintainability and robust automated testing through quality assurance and quality controls.
- Development and testing practices like Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Test Driven Development (TDD) or continuous performance testing.
You’ll fit well here if …
These aren't screening criteria, they're what the job actually asks of you day to day.
- You've dropped your own approach because someone else's was better, and in a discussion, you can summarise someone's point back to them accurately before making your own.
- You’ve mentored someone more junior, and they are a better engineer for it.
- You’ve made a technical design you’ve regretted and can say what you would do differently. You can argue both sides of a decision, ensuring critical thinking is applied to both.
- You’ve inherited someone else’s code and made it better without rewriting it from scratch.
- You've got something wrong and can describe plainly what you did next. When you're stuck, you say so.
- You can walk someone through how you found a bug: what you suspected, what you ruled out, how you knew and they can now repeat your approach.
- You've explained something technical to someone non-technical and checked they'd followed it. You write short messages rather than long ones.
- You've noticed a teammate struggling and done something about it without being asked.
- You say when your work will be done, tell people early when that changes, and know when to stop polishing and hand it over.
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How we use AI
We're direct about this because you'll want to know before you apply.
- We expect you to use it. We pay for the tooling and we'd rather you got to a working answer in two hours than two days. That's 80/20 applied to your own workflow.
- We expect you to understand what you’ve done. Whoever or whatever wrote the code, you own it; which means being able to explain why it works and debug it when it doesn't. Use AI in the technical task if you want to; we'll be asking about your understanding of what you produced, not whether you typed it yourself.
- Humans make the decisions. Trading calls, code review, anything that touches production. No exceptions, and no plans to change that.
- What we don't do, and won't: share any trading data, company data and employee data - these don't go into third-party AI tools. We don't connect agents to our infrastructure. We don't take a vendor's word for how our data is handled.
Examples of early success in this role include the following…
- Something meaningful you have produced is running in production within first couple of months.
- Our junior engineers are visibly better at something because of your mentoring/coaching.
- Raise the bar on our engineering practices or ways of working to be more efficient.
- Getting to know your stakeholders and what they need; and the confidence to tell them when there’s a better way.
- Spotting a problem and then fixing it, without being asked to.
What we can offer you…
We are growing and adding to how we want to make Boba the best place to work on the planet and are always listening to what our team think we can do to achieve that. On top of a culture of personal growth, caring personally, inclusivity where your ideas are heard and often implemented, we can offer:
- £70,000 to £80,000 depending on relevant experience, plus annual discretionary performance bonus.
- Support from a professionally qualified Coach to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.
- A tenured engineer as your mentor from day one.
- Physical health allowance where we provide an allowance to each employee to use towards a physical activity of their choice (e.g., gym membership, Brazilian ju-jitsu, personal trainer, running club; pretty much anything as long as it gets you moving!)
- 39 days holiday, to be taken whenever you want subject to ensuring we have operational and trading coverage. We do not mandate you work public holidays nor do we mandate you must take them off, instead we recognise that UK bank holidays do not
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