Who we are
Boba Commodities are a successful, rapidly growing commodities trading firm with the wider purpose of investing into a better future for us all.
Our vision
To invest our trading profits into community enhancing businesses across the globe that share our values.
Our mission
Through our trading strategies, maximise the opportunity in the commodities and other markets to help us realise our vision.
We believe
Social value and long-term profit are inextricably linked. We carry this philosophy through to the role we play in the commodities markets. As part of this belief, we have ensured we are a carbon negative company, meaning we seek to double offset our carbon footprint, backdated from our inception as a company.
Where we are in our journey
From being founded in 2013, we have grown significantly over the past 10 years. We are now looking to scale our technology infrastructure and levels of automation of our trading processes. To add to the Engineering team, we are looking for a future orientated hands-on DevOps Engineer who has a passion for software engineering, strong attention to detail, commercial focus and excellent communication to help support us and make our vision a reality.
Our values
· We believe in 80/20, the pursuit of non-perfectionism: We ensure we are always focused on the most impactful drivers and results and what achieves the highest value over time spent. We move fast and get things done.
· Adapt & Evolve: We are agile and growth oriented. We won’t get everything right first time, but we are open-minded to learning from mistakes and failures. We adapt and evolve whenever needed, and rely on honest, direct and timely feedback from each other.
· Best Ideas Rise To The Top: We champion the best ideas, not our own ideas. We ensure we listen to other ideas, regardless of the source and embrace cognitive diversity and creating a psychologically safe environment where every voice is heard.
· Care Personally: We care about each other at a personal level as well as ourselves. We put the team’s needs ahead of our own individual needs to support each other as servant leaders. The more we understand each other, the more effective we will be.
These core values are intrinsic in our culture and in everything we do.
What are you going to do?
As part of the Engineering team, you will report directly into the Chief of Staff with the mission to design, deliver and implement the tools and processes for our cloud trading infrastructure and curate a high performing, ‘well-oiled’ Engineering team to support the strategic trading technology vision and blueprint. Specific examples of specific responsibilities are:
· Work closely with the rest of the Engineering team to shape and make the technology vision a reality and be a force multiplier for our technology objectives and strategy.
· Be hands-on, actively contributing to the technical objectives and roadmap delivery by providing hands on delivery of cloud infrastructure designs and solutions in AWS.
· Work with the Development team to continuously improve cloud native architectures, services leveraging containerisation and orchestration technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes etc.
Implement and maintain automated deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code to manage and deliver effective best practices, reduce errors and streamline delivery of changes.
We need someone who must have the following…
· Experienced and effective technical leader
· Be able to communicate complexity with brevity, clarity and precision and solve problems pragmatically and logically under pressure or during intense trading periods.
· Strong self-management such as self-awareness, adaptability, positivity, self-motivation, holding yourself and team to high standards.
· Positive reaction to failure, calm and comfortable in chaos and under pressure while retaining importantly strong ethical standards.
· Ability to design, implement and maintain automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration management solutions. Design, deploy and maintain AWS infrastructure using version-controlled deployment.
· Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate code integration, testing, and deployment. Work in a highly collaborative environment with cross-functional teams to automate and streamline the deployment process using tools such as GitLab, CI/CD, Jenkins.
· Experience in AWS (including AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, Terraform, GIT, and AWS Cloud Management). Ability to manage and optimize cloud-based infrastructure on platforms using AWS, ensuring security, scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
· Experience in Apache Airflow, AWS Backup and S3 versioning for business continuity. Desirable to have AWS networking concepts such as VPN, VPC peering, subnets, security groups, NAT gateways and how to implement scalable and fault tolerant network architectures.
· Experience in implementing and maintaining monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions.
· Best practice: Experience in implementing best practices such as Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), Test Driven Development (TDD) and continuous performance testing using open-source toolsets. Harden deployments for security and high availability by implementing best practice design principles.
· Experience in containerisation and orchestration tools such as Docker/Kubernetes
· Have deep hands-on experience in designing and building low-latency trading or comparable infrastructures and related operational/trading processes.
· Have hands-on experience in building rules-based automation or machine learning technology solutions for trading e.g. automation of trading strategies or other intellectual property.
· Have a passion for building pragmatic technology solutions that focus on delivering the most value over time.
· Proven experience (min. 3 years) as a cloud engineer, solutions architect, or similar role, with hands-on experience designing, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructure in AWS.
Ideally will be a bonus if you have the following…
· Programming experience in C#, Python and/or SQL
· Strong understanding of networking concepts, including virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, routing, load balancing, and security groups in cloud environments.
· Experience in designing and implementing disaster recovery and real-time business continuity solutions for cloud-based applications and services.
You will thrive in the role if you have the following…
· Personal commitment to excellence; to self-development, personal growth, expanding your comfort zone; strong attention to detail, ability and hunger to learn quickly; all of which is balanced with a strong sense of pragmatism.
· Strong team orientation, working collaboratively with high levels of self-motivation and caring personally for the team and co-workers; fosters psychological safety, clarity of purpose.
· Effective active listener. Holds space for other’s ideas, avoids listening purely to respond; listens without ego getting in the way.
· Excellent organisational and time keeping skills.
· Able to clearly establish priorities but remain adaptable in a constantly changing environment.
Personal Fit
Our values run deep. You can come from any background, but championing our culture is critical. We’re looking for a team member who:
· Shares our vision and embodies the Boba culture as a role model.
· Is looking for an organisation that puts its purpose at the heart of what it does.
· Is hungry to help build the company - a proactive and enthusiastic force to improve our capabilities.
· Loves coding and loves putting technology to use in a pragmatic way.
· Has their finger on the pulse of latest information, ideas, and practices, and can transform these into tangible value for our team.
· Leads by first deeply understanding a problem and then leveraging their experience to work with the teams to find solutions.
· Has a keen interest and understanding in the wider technical landscape, regardless of our current tech stack; is intellectually curious.
Why diversity and inclusion is highly important to us
An inclusive and diverse workplace means we highly value differences in race, gender, nationality, culture, sexual orientation, physical ability, cognition, age and background as these differences bring new or different ways of thinking about our work. Therefore, creating a workplace culture that advances belonging and psychological safety brings a mutual respect and acceptance of others and fuels our values of caring personally, adapting and evolving and the best ideas rising to the top.
Application and Interview Process
We are small but growing fast and we need the right people who can help us grow and retain and embed our culture and values. Our selection process is both rigorous and compassionate, but we highly encourage you to approach the journey as your authentic self. You are deciding about whether this role is for you as much as we are, so if we are a natural fit for you and you find yourself enjoying this process then you will likely thrive working at Boba. Below is an outline of what you can expect from the process, but this may change or evolve.
How To Apply
If you apply directly, please include your CV and a cover letter. Whilst your CV can cover what you have experienced, achieved, and accomplished, we really encourage you to take the opportunity to describe your personal 'why' and 'how' in your cover letter to tell us more about you as a person.
We want to get to know who you are as a person and not just what you have done in the past. We will also ask you to complete an online questionnaire which we will use to help us focus the future interview rounds on key aspects of the role that we believe are important for someone to be successful. This same questionnaire has been taken by all our employees.
Round 1: Introductory Interview
The first stage of the process is an introductory interview to ensure you understand as much as possible about who we are, what the role is and how we work. You will meet with our Associate Chief of Staff (Catherine) for approx. 45mins to understand more clearly what the role is about; ask any questions you wish and ensure we discuss anything on your mind about the role or interview process. The goal of this is to help you decide whether you would like to pursue the next steps of the interview process and embark on this journey with us. We want to be as transparent as possible with you.
Round 2: Getting to know each other
Approx. 1.5hrs. We would love to host you at our office and meet you in person, and we will pay any associated travel costs. Typical format will be:
· Meet with our Chief of Staff / Chief People and Culture Officer (Iain) for between 60-90mins.
Round 3: Technical Assessment and Final Round
We would love to host you at our office again and meet you in person, and we will pay any associated travel costs. This process will be in two parts. Should you meet or exceed the threshold of the technical assessment, you will then move to the second part.
· Technical Assessment (1hr) - the team will assign you a technical assessment exercise hosted by our Engineers (Amritha and/or Gary). This will be broken down into a task that involves some coding/code walk through for about 45 mins and a technical discussion regarding system design for about 15 mins.
Break: One of your potential future team will take you for a coffee/tea/beverage for an informal chat with you for 10-15mins for you to ask any questions about the role, Boba or anything else!
If we both wish to continue, then:
• Meet with our COO (Marc) for up to 45mins inc. any questions you may have.
• Meet with our CEO (Samir) for up to 30mins inc. any questions you may have.
What we can offer you
We are growing and adding to how we want to make Boba the best place to work on the planet and are always listening to what our team think we can do to achieve that. On top of a culture of personal growth, caring personally, inclusivity where your ideas are heard and often implemented, we can offer:
· £70-80K Annual salary plus annual discretionary performance bonus.
· Support from a professionally qualified Coach to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.
· Work/life balance. We mainly trade in US markets, and as a result need to ensure we have Engineering available to support the Trading team. However, outside of having appropriate coverage in place, we work hard to stick to an average 8 hour day and you will have a large amount of autonomy over your work. We value output and engagement and we do not like presenteeism, we know that everyone has a life outside of work.
· Comprehensive health care cover, including mental health, dental and optical cover, with zero excess for the employee (and tax is paid by us!) via Aviva.
· Life Insurance and Income Protection via YuLife.
· Physical health allowance where we provide an allowance to each employee to use towards a physical activity of their choice (e.g., gym membership, Brazilian ju-jitsu, personal trainer, running club; pretty much anything as long as it gets you moving!)
· 39 days holiday, to be taken whenever you want subject to ensuring we have operational and trading coverage. We do not mandate you work public holidays nor do we mandate you must take them off, instead we recognise that UK bank holidays do not always align to important dates for everyone so give you the choice.
· Up to £1K a year to support one personal amazing growth goal. Our only guidelines are that it cannot be incongruent to our purpose or values, and it must push you out of your comfort zone.
· Pension contribution.
· A book a month for personal development.
· A gift on your birthday.
· Support to pursue professional certifications/qualifications.
· Fridge full of snacks and drinks (healthy and less-healthy options are available!)
· Boba Day – an optional annual away day for socialising and training together.
· ‘Bobaversary’ recognition for reaching significant milestones in your career with us.
Other examples of situational/ad-hoc schemes we have run for our employees:
· Surprise and delight – we sent our people gifts from us during mandatory WFH periods, just to show we are thinking about them.
· Social events & celebratory gifts for achieving team goals.