About Farewill

All of us are going to die. It’s a fundamental, tragic part of what it is to be human. But the services that should be supporting us haven’t changed in decades.

From writing your will to planning a funeral, the way we deal with death is formal, complicated and expensive. Instead of feeling supported, people feel lost.

But it doesn’t need to be this way. We started Farewill to make the experience warmer, brighter and friendlier.

We’re the UK’s biggest will writer and one of the leading funeral companies in the country. Our generous customers have pledged over £1.03 billion to charities, through donations left in their wills.

We’re backed by top investors who are as excited by our mission as we are, and we’ve won awards for the work we’ve done. But there’s a lot more to do.

The role

This role is all about building. We’re in the privileged position to help people at some of the hardest times in their lives, and we’re passionate about doing the best job possible.

This is a fantastic opportunity to join a lean, dedicated, high performing team as a mid-level engineer, working to inform strategy, build and iterate on a top class product, and make a real difference to our customers. Not for the faint hearted!

We work hybrid, with at least two coordinated onsite days each week in our East London office! You’ll report into Arran France (Wills Engineering Lead) and work closely with Emma Schofield (Wills Product Lead) and the rest of our Wills Product Team.

Over the next year, you will focus on:

1. Improving and evolving our award winning wills product

2. Building industry leading internal tooling for our customer-facing teams

3. Creating and iterating on products and tools for our charity partners, to help them raise the next £1 billion in legacy pledges

We use TypeScript/JavaScript across the stack, build our frontends with React, and use MongoDB and PostgreSQL as our data stores of choice.

About you

Engineers at Farewill come from a wide and varied set of backgrounds; we do not ask for formal qualifications or degree requirements for any of our engineering roles. We’re open to hiring a mid or senior level engineer for this particular opening.

There are three key attributes we’re looking for:

#1 An enthusiast

You love building great products, putting them in peoples’ hands, and overcoming all of the obstacles along the way. You care about delivering value to your users - be they customers, our partners, or internal stakeholders, and enjoy the challenge of raising the bar of technical excellence whilst putting the customer first.

#2 A technical expert

You have a depth of expertise in web based technologies, having built and maintained several production-quality solutions, and are in your element architecting and writing code for both the frontend and backend. You are able to leverage your experience to solve complex problems quickly and to identify solutions to ambiguous requirements.

You enjoy learning, mentoring others, and sharing what you learn with the wider engineering team.

#3 A great communicator

We work in multi-disciplinary teams to deliver amazing results. Teamwork is essential and great communication is a huge part of that. You’re someone who can communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical people in a way that enables them to understand the trade offs.

Desirable Experience/Expertise

Experience in these areas is not a requirement of the role, but any experience is a plus when applying:

• Proven builder: Experience building and delivering high-quality products that meet customer needs.

• Technical expertise: Strong proficiency in web development, relational data modelling, API design, and managing technical debt. Experience working in a Javascript stack. Javascript, TypeScript, Node.js, React, and PostgreSQL.

• Continuous delivery: We ship a lot, multiple times a day in every team. Experience shipping continuously and managing infrastructure as code will be a real bonus

• Effective communicator: Ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical people and collaborate within a team.

• Business understanding: Awareness of how engineering decisions impact the business and ability to prioritise work accordingly.

What we offer

• A salary of £60k-75k

• 25 days of annual leave plus the usual public holidays

• Personal development budget

• Team socials & company-wide events

• A chance to make a meaningful contribution to people's lives and deaths

We’re building a diverse, inclusive team

To change the way the world deals with death we need a team that celebrates diversity in all its forms. We’re building a workplace where everyone is treated fairly and respectfully. If you’re excited about our mission but you’re worried you don’t tick every box in the job description, get in touch anyway. Ability and attitude are just as important as experience.

Let us know how we can support you. If you need any adjustments in our interview process to help set you up for success, just let us know.

Our recruitment process

We like to keep things simple, so this is a broad outline of our process. If there are technical tasks or additional steps, we’ll let you know the first time we talk.

1. Apply for the job through the link on this page.

2. You’ll have an initial chat over Google Meet with a member of our recruiting team, so we can find out more about your experience and ambitions. You can also ask any questions you have about working at Farewill.

3. If we think you’re a good match for the role, we’ll book you in for follow up interviews with the hiring team. These will be a chance to meet some of the people you’ll be working with, and demonstrate your core skills for the job.

4. That’s it! If everyone’s happy, we’ll make you an offer.