Engineering Manager
Remote (UK)
Full-time
Permanent employee
Your mission
OLIO is the world’s only neighbour-to-neighbour food sharing app, and our mission is to solve the problem of food
waste in the home & local community, at scale. We do this by connecting anyone with spare food – which can be
households or food businesses – with neighbours living nearby who would like it. Globally, over one third of all the
food we produce gets thrown away, which is worth over $1 trillion; and in a country like the UK half of all food waste
takes place in the home. OLIO solves this problem with our award-winning mobile & web app.
Over the past 7 years OLIO has grown from a local initiative in North London to a global movement. We now have
over 6 million users who have given away 52 million portions of food, in 62 countries. OLIOers have also given away 3
million household items in our non-food section.
Underpinning OLIO’s incredible growth has been our volunteer programme, with over 75,000 people reaching out to
spread the word about OLIO in their local community. We also work with over 4,500 business locations across the UK
via our Food Waste Heroes Programme to enable them to have zero food waste locations.
We have a bold ambition to have 1 billion OLIOers by 2030, given that reducing food waste has been identified by
Project Drawdown as the #1 most important thing humanity can do to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis.
Our work has been widely recognized, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted OLIO as a "beacon” for
the world, and by Vivatech who awarded OLIO "Next European Unicorn".
https://olioex.com/about/our-impact/
Your profile
Our ideal candidate will first and foremost be as passionate about our mission as we are! In addition to this, you will
have the following attributes:
● Overall experience in software development of 5+ years, at least 2 years in management within tech product
companies.
● Customer-centric approach to building products, and data-driven for decision-making.
● Strong team work abilities, contributing effectively to building a collaborative culture and high performance.
● Strong technical background, capable of challenging engineering decisions aiming to raise standards.
● Passionate about leading and growing people, fostering inclusion and diversity and high degree of empathy.
● Excellent written and spoken communication skills in English.
● Experience in career development, performance management and salary reviews.
● Passionate for solving problems for real customers, oriented to business outcomes.
● Software development experience at least one of the languages ( Javascript / Ruby), and/or frameworks
(React/Rails), or mobile development languages (Java, Kotlin, Swift).
● Experience setting goals and measuring team outcomes.
● Experience getting the very best out of a team.
● Leads by example.
Nice to have
● Experience building teams in a startup environment during hyper growth period.
● Experience leading mobile development teams
● Experience as a former senior software developer.
● Experience hiring and structuring remote teams.
● Experience working with consumer facing products.
All OLIO team members share these qualities:
o Mission obsessed
o Self-starters with a ‘can-do’ attitude
o Resourceful and creative
o Thorough, but able to move quickly and decisively
o A ruthless ability to prioritise
o Excellent communication skills
o Fun to work with ☺
At OLIO we boast a diverse team, with individuals of 18 nationalities, as well as a strong LGBT+ presence (21%) and
an age range from early 20s to 45+. We're committed to keep this going as we grow, and encourage people from all
backgrounds to apply.
Why us?
To help take OLIO to our next level in growth and impact, we’re looking for an Engineering Manager to develop
people, drive the technical decisions and help develop our OLIO application. The person in the role will hire people
for the team and ensure are growing sustainably, keeping them productive and engaged. The Engineering Manager
will report to the CTO and be part of the engineering leadership team.
The next stage of OLIO’s journey will be focused on product development for both the OLIO app and the systems that
govern our Food Waste Heroes Programme. Also, internationalization and we will also need to be ready to
scale/enter new markets faster than planned.
Over the next 2.5 years at OLIO, we will be growing our
● Team to 150+ amazing people
● Revenue from £2.5m ARR to £20m+ ARR
● Community from 5 million members to 25+ million, and 5+ million listings per month
● Presence in a small handful of markets to a dozen international markets
In this role, you will be responsible for:
● Hiring and leading a team of 7 FTEs. This requires focus on processes for onboarding and mentoring
● Taking accountability for technical delivery of the team and product quality, working closely with the Product
Manager and the senior developers
● Defining, prioritizing and executing the technology investments required to improve the performance of the
mobile application and reduction of technical debt
● Defining people allocation for technology investments, operational tasks and business projects.
● Overseeing the team’s overall health and engagement, fostering an inclusive environment for continuous
learning and growth
● Fostering a culture of engineering excellence, setting high operational excellence standards
● Fostering a high performance culture, supporting career development for team members through feedback,
coaching and performance management
● Overseeing the technical direction of the team, reviewing architectural changes and technical improvements,
working closely with the technical leader
● Collaborating with other engineering leaders to sustain high standards and define best practices for the
overall technology team
● Contributing to hiring for the overall tech team
OLIO’s tech stack is:
● React-Native for the mobile app, and web consumer applications
● Ruby-On-Rails core application framework
● Ruby-On-Rails/React volunteer portal
● Hosted on AWS utilising RDS Aurora, Elasticache, S3, CloudFront, ECR, Fargate, Lambda
functions,Cloudwatch,
● Docker
This is an incredibly exciting time to join OLIO and help us unlock our full potential! OLIO is a remote-first
company with a strong culture, and was listed as the 4th best place to work by Escape The City 2022.
We live for our mission and have fun along the way!
