Engineer #2

mission

We believe that the current social care landscape in the UK is deeply broken. Equal Care's mission is to put power back where it belongs: in the hands of the people who give and receive care. We help people giving and receiving care to develop meaningful relationships through our unique, decentralised structure. We are a pioneer in the platform co-operative movement and lean heavily on technical innovation, making it possible to cut out tiers of managers and give that money to the people who do the direct support: our wonderful care and support workers.

In 2022, we doubled the number of hours of care we delivered, whilst maintaining our exceptional turnover rate of 4% (compared to an industry average of 39%). Over the next year, we're learning how to grow the decentralised model with a view to expand outside of Calderdale.

the role at a glance

By working closely with people from all over the co-op, you'll learn what makes our model so special and what's holding it back. Your job will be to find solutions to those problems. It's an extremely varied role, and that's exactly what we find exciting about it.

LOCATION

This position is open to anyone with the right to work in the UK. The vast majority of work is remote but travel to Hebden Bridge and London for occasional workshops (such as co-design sessions with our members) will be necessary based on what work we're doing. Over the past year this has worked out to roughly once a month. Our other engineer, Matt, lives and works in Manchester. Bonus points if you live there as well!

HOURS AND SALARY

You’ll be working full-time for compensation up to £50,000, depending on experience. This role is also available part-time for the right candidate (minimum 3 days a week).

BENEFITS

30 days holiday per year. 4.5% pension contribution.

EQUAL CARE = EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

Equal Care is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, skin colour, sex, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic.

details of the role

Matt is our lead software engineer. You'll be joining him as the second engineer with a view to train and take over the daily operation of the Equal Care platform by the end of 2023, when Matt scales back to a few days per month.

Equal Care takes a Sociocratic approach to organisation; our structure is formed of a distributed network of "circles" that have power over their particular domain. Our engineering approach is to build a toolbox that these circles can reach into and choose to take advantage of in order to organise their care and support needs.

Each circle can be different to other circles in a wide range of ways. We observe and experiment with common themes that appear in order to nudge our circles towards building themselves up to be healthy and resilient. Software Engineers at Equal Care are responsible for the end-to-end process of turning those observations into experiments, and turning those experiments into well-crafted features.

Over the first nine months, your job role will encompass these kinds of responsibilities:

• Month 1
  • Meet the team, understand Equal Care's past, present and future, introduce yourself across the organisation and begin to craft relationships with people who enjoy engaging with the platform.
  • Take in the technical big picture and dive into some of the more crucial areas like our Neo4J Database, our permissions data model and our AWS infrastructure.
  • Squash some bugs to familiarise yourself with the main stack.
• Months 2 - 4
  • Take over responsibility for a feature domain and shape its progression.
  • Get comfortable with designing, building, testing and monitoring new features.
  • Craft internal tools that engineers use to maintain the platform quickly and easily.
• Months 5-9
  • Focus on longer term goals and patterns that we want to achieve. Advocate for and own the progress of reaching those goals.
  • Form a deeper understanding of where you want to take your role and the platform.
  • Work closely with Matt to define how the Equal Care engineering circle should progress from here.

personal qualities and values

Equal Care is a very values-led organisation and we need you to feel strongly about our values as well. By taking on this role, you’ll be making important decisions that significantly affect the lives of all of our members. Holding ourselves accountable to the same set of values is crucial to making choices that resonate with our members' needs.

There is one value we ask everyone in our community to bring and to uphold: mutual care for one another. Complementing that core value, we aim to be hyper-accessible, open and transparent. We do not “move fast and break things” - in our world, “things” are people and their relationships to one another and they’re far too important to break.

Equal Care is looking for a future leader, but the specifics of how this happens is down to where your personal goals overlap with organisational ones. We do, however, believe that there are some qualities that will be extremely important to have in order to lead successfully at this stage of our growth:

• You must be a “manager of one”. Equal Care is full of great ideas but lacks enough time to do them all. A crucial part of your role is to own decisions about what to spend time on; it could be features for our booking system, our digital Medicine Administration Record, tools to help our workers find cover for their shifts or anything that becomes an immediate blocker to our growth or quality.
• You must be privacy-conscious. We deal with sensitive information about people and we must treat that data with the respect and due care that it deserves.
• You must be accessibility-conscious. This doesn’t mean lighthouse scores; this means real-world, messy interactions with our services. Many of our members will never use a computer directly but our services must be accessible to them in one form or another.
• You must have experience and be comfortable with early-stage companies and the uncertainty inherent within them. We are still proving our model works at a larger scale. There will often be no clear answers to a question but you will be empowered to find them.

technology

There are two must-haves:

• Fluency with TypeScript
• An understanding of Docker

Here's a flavour of the technology you'll be working with. We're not looking for someone who knows everything; as long as you can learn quickly, you'll fit in perfectly:

• Neo4J
• Nest (TypeScript)
• Next (TypeScript)
• Rocket Chat
• Keycloak
• AWS Cloudformation based around ECS
• Ansible (though we'd like to move away from this)

contact

If making a difference to social care and taking on more responsibility sounds like something you're looking for, then please get in touch with us at jobs@equalcare.coop.

No agencies please.