- Role types: Permanent
- Role hours: Full time/ flexible
- Location: Leeds
- Deadline: 14th Feb 2025 (we will interview before this date and may close early if we receive great applications so apply ASAP)
Who we are:
The Data City is a tech scaleup proudly HQ’d in Leeds, expanding our influence worldwide. Our mission? To disrupt the outdated status quo and build the world’s first real-time global industrial classification system. This revolutionary data infrastructure is redefining how Governments and industries make economic and commercial decisions, fuelling innovation, investment, and growth.
To continue improving our UK product, to continue developing core features, and to develop and deploy a more fully-featured global product we are hiring up to six people covering the following roles,
- Front-end developer and/or data visualisation expert.
- Back-end developer with DevOps interests.
- Data scientist and/or statistician focused on R&D and product development.
- Product manager with experience as a software engineer.
Roles are based in Leeds with at least two and ideally three days per week together in our office. We will be hiring at a mix of experience levels and will offer competitive annual salaries between £35,000 and £95,000 plus potential future option to participate in employee share growth scheme. Flexible and part-time working is common within our company and is available for all roles. Whatever level you join us at you will start your work with us by working intensively as part of a team on a real project of around six weeks that we are delivering to customers.
The Data City is a world-leading and fast-growing tech company in Leeds. Our technical focus is on high performance data analysis and application of machine learning. We tell our customers what companies do and we are the best in the world at it.
We have solved problems in weeks that had persisted for decades in economics. With RSICs we have fixed SIC codes, the standard method for defining the sector of company activity. We have built and continue to improve their replacement, real-time industrial classifications (RTICs).
We are growing our team to expand our innovations to the whole world and to ensure that we make the next innovations that help us retain our leading position.
We have no strong opinions on operating systems or programming languages. Our team works on Windows, Mac, and Linux and in PHP, R, Python, C#, .NET, Excel, and more. We work with databases from MySQL and SQLite to ClickHouse and DuckDB.
We will get you a fantastic laptop of your choice when you join us and you will have access to cloud resources that you need.
Your involvement in a great project, a link to a fantastic blog post or article, a strong record of software contribution, and many other possible experiences will outweigh formal qualifications for all of these roles. We have fantastic people with educations including apprenticeships, PhDs, evening classes, and further education college. Your greatest qualification will be finding mediocrity infuriating.
We believe in the summary of The Agile Manifesto, though not all of its fashionable application. We ship working software early and improve it often. Our code is on GitHub and our servers deploy from there automatically. We use our own software, we work with, watch, and listen to our customers so we can build software that works for them and us. We put some tasks in Monday.com and we check up on them every now and again but we don’t have daily standups or a scrum master or kanban boards for everything.
We show each other what we’ve built, we have staging platforms so we can use and check what our teammates build, we sit in the same room regularly and we talk to each other, with our customers, and with the world both online and at real life events.
Markets are conversations and we know that we will only win in the marketplace if we converse with it clearly.
Front-end developer and/or data visualisation expert
Our current product front-end is written in PHP, JavaScript, and HTML with a limited number of lean libraries such as leaflet and chartjs. Rapid development, simplicity, and high performance have been our focus and that will continue. You will join this team and help us grow in at least one of the following areas,
- Better data visualisation: We currently draw maps with leaflet, including some WebGL accelerations. We use Chart.js for most of our graphing. Our current design experience and intuitions are limited and we’d love you to help us.
- New technologies: If you like TypeScript and you think we would too, we’d love you to teach us. We’re just as interested if the new technologies you think will make us better are ones we don’t know much about. Convince us.
- More capacity: We need more great people to build new tools using our current technologies and improve our existing tools.
In all areas, and others we haven’t thought of yet, we are happy to teach you if you are keen to learn. We are even more keen to learn from you.
APPLY HERE
Back-end developer with DevOps interests
Our current product server and machine learning processes are written in C# and .NET. Our data preparation and web scraping pipelines are mostly written in Python. Our code is all on GitHub and deploys automatically to both staging and live servers. We have a modern, lean, and performant deployment system spread across OVH cloud and Azure.
You will join this team and help us grow in at least one of the following areas,
- Greater automation: While much of our data preparation and server deployment processes are automated, they still require too much manual intervention too often. You will help us to achieve a greater level of automation even as we scale our data enormously.
- Better performance and scalability: A key strength of our product is its unrivalled performance. This lets us provide features to our customers that our competitors cannot at far lower costs than expected. High performance code has consistently given us the edge in the market and you will have experience or ideas on how to achieve it. If you know what Rust is, let us know. If you’ve ever written something that works in CUDA, that would be cool too, but it’s definitely not necessary.
- Faster development: More of our team contribute more code to our data preparation and core server product. This is helping us develop more and more complex features faster and is welcome, but it requires more support. If we have experience with such challenges, we’d love to work with you.
In all areas, and others we haven’t thought of yet, we are happy to teach you if you are keen to learn. We are even more keen to learn from you.
Data scientist and/or statistician focused on R&D and product development
We both develop our own machine-learning methodologies and apply methods from elsewhere. We are currently developing new methods that prioritise the robustness of our machine learning methods to noise and the explainability of our methods even as we adopt more advanced AI techniques. This and other work often require detailed and rigorous investigation and analysis. Our work in this area often takes months and ends in failure.
You are likely to have a strong background in statistics and relevant areas of maths. You are likely to know how matrix multiplication works and be able to have a conversation on why it’s relevant to machine learning and artificial intelligence. You’ll be comfortable expressing complicated statistical concepts around error rates, false positives, false negatives, coverage, and more in simple ways.
We mostly do our development work on samples of our data in Excel, R, and Python. We will help you to scale up solutions in higher performing systems and databases.
We write frequent technical blogs, many of which are widely read and lead to invitations to talks at conferences. We will encourage you to do the same and help you attend such conferences and make a name for yourself in the field if you want.
You are likely to work on projects such as,
- Improving how we find websites for companies: We have developed the best methods in the world for finding the websites of companies. You will make these processes even better and help us move beyond a limited set of languages to cover the whole world.
- Ensuring explainability of our machine learning systems: Our current machine learning methods are fully explainable. Improvements to these methods applying more modern AI techniques are less explainable. You will help us fix this problem.
- Automating more of our quality control processes: The quality of our data is a key value for our business. The more we automate the automatable parts of our quality control the more time we have to add value as humans. You will help us with this.
- Accurately communicating uncertainties in our data: No data is perfect and we are transparent about the uncertainties in our data. In addition to reducing these uncertainties you will ensure that our customers understand the uncertainties in our data and the caution they should take in using it.
In all areas, and others we haven’t thought of yet, we are happy to teach you if you are keen to learn. We are even more keen to learn from you.
Product manager with experience as a software engineer
The largest competitive advantage of our business is that our product is better than our competitors. We have achieved this by focusing on product development, building fast, releasing often, and improving quickly. We have always done best when we have as little process as necessary.
As we grow as a team and do more work around the world we know that the amount of process we define as the least amount of process necessary will grow. You will help us to create and develop these processes and be part of the team that builds products using them.
We think that Camille Fournier has great ideas on how to be a manager within technology companies and we expect that you will have read her work, listened to her interviews, or read and listened to similar people. Having read her work you will know that to do this job you should be an experienced software engineer and keen to work on technical problems as part of teams across our business. You will both delegate and do and make the right decision on the best balance of the two. You will take responsibility for the successful outcomes of those decisions.
You are likely to work on projects in the areas of,
- Showing our product to the world, working with customers on problems, and coming to an opinion on our product based on their feedback.
- Prioritising product development and communications strategies to deliver customers with what they need.
- Working with our teams to rapidly build and deploy developments that can be done quickly and to prioritise and plan developments that will take longer.
- Reporting on progress and plans to the board, to the rest of our team, and to the world.
You will have considerable freedom to shape this role according to your experiences and your confidence in success.
What next?
Apply using the links above, we will be intouch once we have reviewed your CV and CL.
- Interviews will be done as a short teams call (circa 15-30 minutes)- it is essential you have read this page indepth, and, if you are the right person, you will have done much more research! If you pass this stage you will be set a task to present at the second stage interview.
- 2nd stage will be an in person interview where you will present your task and discuss your work and skills with some of the team you will be working with if you are sucessful.
We will be interviewing for this role before the deadline, therefore you are encouraged to apply as soon as possible.