Your First Ruby Developer Job

Work and learn with us

Applications by 13th November

CoverageBook is a Software as a Service (SaaS) success story. We help PR professionals make beautiful reports that demonstrate the value of their work for clients and stakeholders, while also saving hours of manual busywork.

Established in Brighton in 2014, we have 2,700 customers across the world and are a calm and profitable business. We don't have unrealistic external pressure to grow, but we continue to grow anyway because it’s fun and we want to help more people.

We’re looking for a junior developer to join the product team. We want to be your first helpful step on a longer career journey.

This is a year long contract, fully-paid at market rate. At the end of the year, we’ll help you find and prepare for your next role, you’ll be ready.

Why only a year? We are intending to do this again, next year, with more folks just like you.

What we expect from you

Contribute directly to the codebase and thus the success of the business.
Be in our office in Brighton for two days per week. Learning in person is higher bandwidth than being in a Zoom box all the time.
You’re expected to spend 20% of your time not working on “work stuff” but continuing to learn & experiment. We will help you find resources and guide you as you progress.

What you can expect from us

Support via pairing with our product team.
Weekly 1-2-1 to discuss progress and problems with Andy the CTO.
A business, where decisions and plans are discussed in the open.
A MacBook laptop to take with you at the end of the year.

A Small, Calm, Company

We’re eleven people and the business deliberately grows much faster than our headcount. Which means we’re in charge of our own destiny.

Our Development Team

Andy Croll

CTO • •

In his spare time runs a Ruby conference, a mentorship programme and a programming newsletter.

Dan Goodwin

Senior Developer •

Has been at CoverageBook from the start. Years of experience.

Emma Beynon

Senior Developer •

Makers Academy graduate, ex-Government Digital Service.

Mark Perkins

Senior Front-end Developer •

Worked at Clearleft. Not a Rubyist when he joined, authored the most successful gem of any of us.

Technologies we use:

Ruby, Rails, RSpec, Jekyll, JavaScript (Stimulus), Bootstrap, TailwindCSS, Postgres, Heroku, AWS

What skills do you need to apply?

We are looking for folks with good written and spoken communication skills with an ability to work well in a small team. You should be able to demonstrate the ability to define and solve problems and have a high bar for the quality of your work. You should have had exposure to Ruby or Ruby on Rails plus an enthusiasm to keep learning after your initial coding education; whether self-taught, university or boot camp.

Selection Process

Stage 1 Closes 13th November

Submit your CV plus a cover letter

Stage 2 Closes 20th November

There will be a take home coding test (approx 30–60 minutes work)

Stage 3 Interviews 21st—25th November

A ten minute presentation to our team where you'll discuss and share a Rails project you’ve built. Plus a chat about the technical test and an opportunity for you to ask questions.

You should be able to talk about and walkthrough a Rails project you have built, a hobby one is fine. Eloquently describe the challenges you set out to solve, the problems you had and the parts you are most proud of.

We encourage applications from underrepresented folks.
Don’t pre-screen yourself out. Apply.

What work will you be doing?

While we’d expect it to take a few weeks before you’re shipping consistantly, it won’t take long before you are working on these sorts of projects with the help of more experienced developers in our team.

The big relaunch of CoverageBook in 2022 means we built quickly. Now we need to do a better job finishing up the small things we’ve missed.
Our data collection is pretty great, but it could always be better. We’re constantly adding new sources and ensuring we’re getting accurate data as fast as we can for our customers.
Our support and onboarding team do a lot, they could do more if we gave them internal tools to better surface insights and fix common problems.
No software is bug-free. There'll be technical support, bug fixes, refactoring, upgrades and the day to day maintenance of our applications.

Plus you’ll have 20% of your time dedicated to self-study in the manner in which you learn best. We can help you with resources for this.

Things we aren’t going to offer

Fully remote. We’ve always been remote-friendly but we’re currently primarily based along the south coast. Getting together is part of the fun for us, plus in your early career it’s easier to build context, skills and comfort with at least some in-person time.

You also won’t get to dive into the “latest” and shiniest technology. For us, predictable production-hardened software, built well and tested automatically (80-95% coverage) & by other team members, means fewer PagerDuty alerts to wake us from our beds or to interrupt our holidays.

We’re not a big team and we aren't going to grow massively, if you want the learning from that specific chaos you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Salary

£30k

And HR-ish Benefits:

30 days leave
A Mac laptop that you can keep after the first year
Health Cash Plan
Pension (5% employee contribution, 3% company contribution)
Training budget — whatever you need to do your job and learn well

Want to Apply?

Send us your CV/LinkedIn and write a cover letter.

Apply Here by 13th November

More detailed instructions are in the Typeform.