It’s not often that we open up enough Tech roles in London to merit a blog post but now that we are I want to share them as broadly as I can! This post is my attempt to go beyond the Job Description and explain why I’m personally excited about each of these opportunities. I genuinely believe each of them present a great career and growth opportunity.

We’re a team of nine in the UK: an Architect, 4 Staff Engineers, 2 Senior Engineers and 2 Software Engineers. That’s a little top heavy, right, but it gives us a fantastic environment for us to support new employees. People at BuzzFeed are incredibly giving with their time and their experience, far more than anywhere I’ve ever worked, and this is something we take a great source of pride in. We’d all be massively invested in your growth within the team.

I’d love to hear from you if any of the roles sound interesting. I’ve left links below where you can apply and if you have any further questions I’m happy to chat more about them. You can DM me via twitter (@ianfeather) or email me at ian.feather@buzzfeed.com.

These roles are correct as of Nov 2019. An up to date listing can always be found at https://www.buzzfeed.com/about/jobs.

Software Engineer (Frontend)

From the Job Description: BuzzFeed’s Site Group is looking for a frontend Software Engineer to help build a more accessible, performant and engaging web experience on buzzfeed.com. As a software engineer on the Site team you’ll be a key part of our ongoing project to build the next generation of buzzfeed.com using Next JS and React.

The role is perfect for someone fairly new in their career who wants to accelerate their learning whilst working on sites with significant scale. Five of the nine engineers in the UK have their background in Frontend development, and have built large portions of buzzfeed.com, so you’d be coming into an ideal environment for growth.

It’s also just an exciting time to be a Frontend Engineer at BuzzFeed! We’re in the process of rebuilding a large portion of the rendering services that power buzzfeed.com and we want your insight and perspective on how to do that. You might think from my description of the London team that we’re very hierarchical and you would be a small cog in this process but, because of the way we organise ourselves, every single engineer is able to have a significant impact on the way we write code and build products.

Here’s a link to the full Job Description.

Principal Engineer (Infrastructure)

From the Job Description: BuzzFeed’s Core Infrastructure Group is looking for a highly experienced engineer to help take the infrastructure that powers our sites and products to the next level. You will Influence the direction of the core infra group, ensuring we continue to solve the most important challenges to BuzzFeed’s infrastructure.

This is a really exciting opportunity for someone to step straight into a leadership role and influence the direction of our infrastructure group. It’s also a rare role: we only have a handful of Principal Engineers at BuzzFeed and typically promote into the position. If you’ve formed strong opinions about how organisations should deploy, run and observe software, and want to put them into practice at scale, then this could be ideal for you!

Real talk, our infrastructure is in a pretty good place right now. We want someone who can raise the bar. The position is opening following one of our leads moving internally to stand up a new team, and we want someone who can come in and spot the opportunities that we haven’t seen.

You’d get to have broad impact and think strategically but you’d also still be getting pretty hands on with code. Hopefully that appeals to you. In fact, getting hands on with code would be important because two of our engineers in the UK work in the infrastructure group and would lean on you for mentorship in this area.

Here’s a link to the full Job Description.

Associate/Junior Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

From the Job Description: In your first week you will be guided through fixing a bug in one of our services and deploying the change to production. In your first month you will learn how to build and provision our infrastructure. In your first three months you will work with your team to deliver meaningful improvements to our infrastructure. In your first six months you will facilitate a blameless retrospective.

Our infrastructure team is one of the highest performing we have in the organisation and one that cares deeply about engineering best practices. On the team you’ll be exposed directly to the challenges of scaling systems and engineering organisations, in an environment that really values correctness and diligence. I really can’t think of any better place to start your career.

Btw, you don’t need to be an “infrastructure engineer” to want to take this career path. You just need to be an inquisitive person who enjoys finding out how things work under the hood. If you’ve enjoyed doing that in your day to day work then you might find it interesting to pursue it full time.

Here’s a link to the full Job Description.

Senior Data Scientist / Data Scientist

From the Job Description: BuzzFeed is looking for data scientists to join its New York, London, and Minneapolis offices. We’re seeking passionate professionals who have a proven track record using data in a meaningful way - whether building product or supporting decision-making. You balance technical expertise, domain knowledge and a capacity to be deeply inquisitive.

All organisations these days say they’re “data driven”, it’s not something that really separates you from the crowd anymore. That doesn’t make it any less true though. If anything, BuzzFeed might be somewhat more unique by having always been data driven, it’s how the company knew what to pursue to drive the significant growth we’ve seen over the past 13 years. There’s a tremendous appetite for data across the organization. I see questions being asked by content creators and curators that push the data team to provide answers in ways that I haven’t seen elsewhere. On top of that, our data infrastructure is on solid footing, meaning that as a data scientist you are able to work on some of the most interesting problems in media, ranking and recommending content to audiences around the world.

We’ve never had someone from Data Science working out of the UK so this role is particularly exciting for me as I think you’ll be able to spot opportunities that we haven’t yet seen, working closely with the tech team but also being exposed to the work of the content teams. You’ll also make us much more efficient as a London tech team by allowing us to move more quickly on date engineering products.

Here’s a link to the full Job Description.