Replace me at woombikes.com

December 23, 2020

I joined woom in early 2018 and it has been a challenging, but very rewarding adventure so far. After almost 3 years working with a wide range of interesting software projects that allowed us to scale across the globe, I felt it was time for me to take on a new challenge in a different field. I’m joining the fantastic Web team at N26 as a Tech Lead of their Core segment next year to help them change banking for the better and that is pretty exciting.

I’m writing this blogpost to express my gratitude for the amazing woom team and also to invite you, if you are interested in challenging projects, to replace me and continue the amazing work we have been doing so far.

Disclaimer: This is not a job ad. If you wish to apply, please have a look at the application page here.

About the Company

woom is still a young company, but it has been quite successful and growing fast like a rocket since it was founded by Marcus Ihlenfeld and Christian Bezdeka in 2013.

Whenever I get the chance to talk about woom, especially for friends who have kids, I tell them we make “Lamborghini” bikes for kids. I’m not talking about luxury or pricing here, I am talking about an amazing design and quality which makes our bikes insanely good. Our mission is to see as many children as possible loving to ride their bikes, and for that to happen, we have to make damn good bikes. And to be completely honest, we do a pretty awesome job. Our motto is “Think like a child, act like a Pro.”

Our bikes are super light-weight and tailor-made with kids in mind. It isn’t just an adult bike that was shrunk to fit kids. No, far from that, all the components are engineered from scratch taking into consideration real-world kids size, weight and whatnot.

So if you always wanted to work for a company that has a true positive impact in future generations, woom is definitely a great place for you to be part of. Our headquarters is located in Klosterneuburg, directly on the outskirts of Vienna.

A Kick-ass Team

The whole woom team is distributed across Europe, USA and now it’s expanding to Asia. But talking about the Tech team specifically, we are four developers, two project managers, a system admin and a team lead working on different projects, ranging from internal systems that help to expand our business to our e-commerce platform that delivers our bikes in several countries and continents.

Besides small projects that help other teams in the company to work with ease, The developers are working in two high-profile projects:

The Odoo ERP system which powers our warehouse. It’s written in Python and it’s open-source
The e-commerce platform (more about it later on)

Those are the main projects that need love the most, so you will probably be helping on both (mostly on the e-commerce side), either by writing highly scalable code or contributing to technical decisions that have a big impact on the future of the business.

The Job

I usually describe myself as the Jack-of-all-trades Software Engineer at woom, but if you like a cooler term, you can call it a Full-Stack Software Engineer. Jokes aside, the job is quite broad and requires strong technical skills on “how the Web works”, attention to detail and focus on making our customers happy. With that being said, I still believe that this isn’t the most important thing we need. Most importantly, you must be good at people. We need someone kind and understanding, that can put themselves in other people’s shoes and listen to what they have to say. The software you write is meant to help the people around you, so if you seriously consider the person on the other side, I’m pretty damn sure you can write good software.

Your responsibilities would be quite broad, but if I could pin-point them, they would be:

Primarily focused on our e-commerce platform by writing code, caring about infrastructure (mostly automated with Terraform), monitoring and scalability (More on the tech-stack later).
Contribute to technical discussions and decisions, even for things unrelated to the e-commerce platform. After all, you are a Software Engineer that will be there to support the team on solving challenging problems.
Define and document internal processes. An example could be “How to deploy our e-commerce infrastructure in a new country” including all the technical steps necessary to tackle a new market like accepting multi-currency payments, localization and so on.
Nice to have:
- Interested in project management, agile and topics related to that.
- Experience with CI and CD. (We use Gitlab)

The Tech Stack

Since your primary focus would be on our e-commerce platform, you are probably interested in its ins and outs. Here is a breakdown of the tech we use at woom:

JavaScript and TypeScript are our languages of choice.
MongoDB is our database through MongoDB Atlas.
Our frontend is written with Nuxt.js (an isomorphic framework based on Vue.js.)
We use several SaaS platforms that are vital for scalability and growth. Here the most important ones you will be dealing with on a daily basis:
- Shopify as our headless GraphQL e-commerce platform.
- Kentico Kontent as our multi-language/multi-country CMS platform.
All those services are brought together via a GraphQL API using Apollo Federation.
AWS is our cloud provider. We also use Hetzner for some other web applications.

Wrapping Up

If you made it this far and you feel like working with this amazing team, give it a shot. Even If you don’t check all the boxes for this role, but if you feel strongly and motivated to work in a fun and friendly company, I would still encourage you to apply. Our lovely HR team will be happy to review your application. Finally and above all, we value diversity, so we would love to see folks from underrepresented groups applying for this position.