Gousto

WHY GOUSTO

At Gousto, the lastest Unicorn, technology is at the heart of everything we do.

Using industry-leading technology, we’ve connected over 6 million people to delicious food so far. We use technology to give our customers a more convenient way to shop and a smarter way to plan their weekly meals. We've been on a mission to make the food and packaging in our boxes more sustainable, and so far we've made huge strides and saved 100 tonnes of plastic. By focusing on environmentally friendly solutions we're well on our way to hitting our pledge to reduce our plastic usage.

We are growing rapidly, and we’re looking for bright people with a can-do attitude and bias towards action. Think you have a great idea? We’ll test it! Think that idea is better than the CEO’s? If it is, we’ll use it instead! We’re all building this company together, so everyone has a say in it’s future!

Passion and ambition are important, and so is team fit. We’re a very diverse team, containing a wide range of nationalities and age ranges. A real mixed bag!

If you have the same hunger to succeed as you do for lunch, get in touch!

TOOLS & STACK

Technology, Data Science and AI are at the heart of Gousto. The code we write powers every aspect of our business from the recommendation engine powering our e-commerce experience right down to the genetic algorithms used to efficiently route boxes in our warehouse.

We use the latest technologies to create simple and elegant solutions to complex problems. We’re ‘all in’ on AWS using many of its services. Our platform and continuous delivery pipeline is fully automated using Cloudformation & Ansible, we release code to production multiple times a day and we’re in the process of moving our microservices architecture to containers. We build our services in Python, PHP and Node.js with a significant proportion now delivered via AWS Lambda. Our frontend is written in React.

SOME THINGS WE'RE THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW

• We’re on a mission to serve up 400 million balanced and nutritious meals by 2025. To do this we’re continually focused on shipping new features, experimenting with the best possible approach to a problem, supporting other teams or departments, or doing whatever it takes to help us hit our business goals.
• Structuring our systems for scale: we're building a modern microservices-based infrastructure that allows for autonomy of teams, freedom to solve problems in the most appropriate language, fault tolerance, and reliable monitoring and alerting across services.
• On the customer experience side, since food is emotional we’re personalising the experience: we currently offer 40 recipes per week and this number is growing fast, meaning you need a menu that’s personalised just for you. To get there, we are using AI (a similar method used by Netflix) to show customers personalised recipe recommendations.

ENGINEERING AT GOUSTO

We believe that teams work best when they’re given problems to solve, not solutions to build. Teams are formed around business goals, and are often truly cross functional to bring people from across the company together for a specific goal.

We love data and experiment whenever we can. Sometimes that means testing out new versions of our algorithms, at other times it might be an A/B test on the frontend. Teams work together to decide on the best ideas and approaches for tests.

Most of our applications are written in PHP, with a React frontend. Python and Node.js Lambdas are running in Production and will form more of our technology stack in the near future. We like DynamoDB as a data store and are investing in moving services into Docker.

All of our services are hosted on AWS, code lives in GitHub, and we use CircleCI for CI/CD.

OUR OWNERSHIP PRINCIPLES

DREAM

Be curious, learn and grow

Today’s good is tomorrow’s mediocre. We’re always looking for ways to improve Gousto, our team and ourselves.

Think big

We don’t say “can’t”; we say “how can we?”. We challenge ourselves to do bigger and better things and don’t let boundaries get in the way of our ambition.

DIsagree & Commit

We have the humility to listen, the conviction to respectfully disagree, and - once a decision has been made - the enthusiasm to commit wholeheartedly to its outcome.

DELIVER

Focus on impact

We don’t give marks for effort alone - we give full marks for results. We understand where we can add the most value and obsess about making improvements every day.

Own the solution

Having high standards makes it easy to spot problems. Success comes from taking ownership and seeing it through.

Get things done

Speed matters: if we don’t do it now, others will get there first. We’re impatient for change. We work hard to make things happen at pace.

CARE

Put Gousto first

We’re all responsible for Gousto’s success. There’s only “us” not “them”. We make decisions that are right for Gousto, ahead of our own individual or team needs.

Make 1+1 = 3

We can only achieve big things by working collaboratively. We respect different people’s skills, experience and points of view. We work as one team to have the biggest impact.

Fulfil our potential

We’re not perfect. We always want to grow and develop. We actively seek and give honest feedback to help us be the best we can be.

WHAT OUR EMPLOYEES SAY

"After being at Gousto for a few weeks, I can already tell I am part of something special! All our teams are working hard to build a business that produces amazing meals for families across the UK while taking every opportunity to do it in a sustainable way. Even though this all began back in 2012, we are just getting started!"

"The thing that's special about Gousto is that every team from our recipe developers to our software engineers understand the importance of working together. We know we can't accomplish anything significant by ourselves and so everyone goes out of their way to help the people they work with. It sounds simple but it's so important and also quite rare."