Backend developer - Mid level
About us
Food waste is a $1 trillion problem – costing the world over 1% of global GDP. We’re dead set on solving the problem and looking for people to help us achieve our mission. We, at Winnow, believe that food is far too valuable to waste, and that technology can transform the way we produce food. Our team is made of people who all share a passion for food and technology.
Winnow was founded in London in 2013 to help the hospitality industry prevent food waste through internet of things tools in the kitchen. We have worked with thousands of sites and are operating in over 90 countries around the world supported by our offices in London, Dubai, Singapore, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Chicago. We are a scale-up stage company with a strong base of clients who are rolling out our system globally. We have blue-chip customers including Accor Hotels, IKEA, IHG, Marriott, Compass Group and many others.
Winnow’s clients on average reduce waste by over 50% by value and sustain savings. Winnow works with hotels, universities and schools, staff restaurants, event/hospitality kitchens, buffets, pubs, and high street restaurants. Where the system is permanently adopted, pre-consumer waste value is reduced by 50% - 70% with no detrimental impact to the perceived quality or value of the offer to their customers. This represents a typical improvement of food cost savings of 3% to 8%, commonly a 40%+ increase in profitability for operations.
As the global leader in addressing food waste, we are committed to continue pushing the envelope on what technology can do to solve this problem. Winnow Vision, our new artificial intelligence-based technology, is trained to automatically track all food waste thrown away. It has won awards at the World Economic Forum and has received tremendous enthusiasm from our clients and the industry. You can read more about it on our website.
Other recent accolades saw Winnow listed in the 2025 Sunday Times Best Places to Work - a recognition based on feedback from our UK team. While this award is based in the UK, it reflects something global: a culture built on purpose, collaboration, and the belief that businesses can - and should - tackle real-world problems while being great places to work. Previous awards saw Winnow in the top 10 of the FoodTech 500 awards - the worlds first definitive list of the global entrepreneurial talent at the intersection between food, technology and sustainability, as well as winning Impact 50's most impactful companies to work for. You can read more about it here.
We are passionate about living our values and place them at the centre of everything we do. We are excited about like minded talent who share these values, joining us in our mission:
Equal parts head and heart. We’re both passionate and measured. We carefully balance the need for quick solutions and pragmatism with the ability to step back, take in the bigger picture and build for the long term.
Bravely honest. With each other, that means we’re a transparent organisation where healthy, respectful debate is encouraged. With our customers, we challenge them if we don’t think they’re achieving their goals, whether they be environmental or financial.
People of action. Done is better than perfect, and we learn by boldly doing then rapidly improving. We’re breaking new ground, so we know things might go wrong. But we judge ourselves and each other on our reaction and our resilience.
Bound by food. We’re a diverse bunch, but our belief in the value of food is the common thread in everything we do. With each other, we celebrate through our love and respect for food. With our customers, it means we work hard to develop creative tools to make it easy for chefs to value food.
Hungry and humble. Our product is revolutionary, our people are impressive, and we’re hungry for change. But, we’re just the catalyst for a bigger movement. We stay humble regardless of our success, and make chefs the heroes in this journey.
People and planet positive. We’re caretakers of the planet, helping to preserve and support it for now and the future. Our work already minimises the impact that the hospitality industry has on the planet, and we’re also committed to actively reducing our own footprint while doing so. We’re leaving the planet and its people better off than we found them.
This is an opportunity to join an exciting organisation and help us propel our growth at what are truly the most exciting and dynamic points in time in our business. You will work alongside a driven team who are motivated by building an exciting business and leaving the world a better place than we found it.
About the role
Our team is responsible for building tools used by our customers and Winnow teams to manage the food waste tracking activities, and present high-quality, clear, actionable insights about what is wasted and how can it be reduced.
Developing such a product involves many different concerns and teams: creating solutions that work well in a busy kitchen environment, scalable and flexible cloud systems, managing large amounts of data, and exposing it to customers.
We are looking for a talented senior software engineer to join our team and help us in this mission. With front-line exposure to our systems, you will have the opportunity to expand / enrich your knowledge in this exciting and cutting edge arena.
We use a wide variety of technologies to solve the complex problems we are facing. Our favourite candidates are developers that follow best practices in any programming language, who use the best tool for the job and can adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
Key responsibilities
This role will sit within our Cluj development teams, working on internal and/or customer facing tooling and analytical applications.
You will be expected to be involved with all aspects of software delivery:
- Creating technical designs
- Writing reusable, testable, and efficient code
- Implementing automated tests
- Deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the production system
You will be working as part of a best in class product and engineering team, delivering cutting edge software solutions.
Our Technology
Our current technology stack is outlined below:
- Java 17
- Spring Boot, Apache Camel
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS Redshift
- VueJS 3
- REST APIs
- Microservice-style, event-driven cloud architecture
- Kafka, MQTT
- Docker for both our cloud and edge-device applications
- AWS
- IoT ‘smart’ edge devices (nVidia embedded GPUs)
- Linux-based embedded OS on our Edge devices
- Continuous Integration and Delivery using Jenkins, SonarQube
- Terraform, Kubernetes, NewRelic for infrastructure management
- In the company we also use: Go, Python, Android apps (Kotlin), Grafana, Pentaho / Saiku, React Native, Serverless functions
Requirements
- You should have a good understanding of the Java programming language and developing webservices which you will have gained in your professional working career
- You have a deep understanding and good experience of relational databases and SQL queries (ideally PostgreSQL)
- Your primary focus will be developing our server-side software (mostly Java using Kafka or REST APIs) but able to help out with other technologies (e.g. Python, Go) when necessary
- Understanding of programming (not just using frameworks, extensions and plugins but understanding what they do, how they work and if needed build/extend them)
- Understanding of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Unit and Integration Testing
- Experience working with tools like JIRA and Confluence
- Experience with the development of a major project/product hosted in AWS is a plus
- Having interest to learn and work with other tools and languages, such as Python (preferred) and Go is a plus
- Using Jenkins as the CI tool is a plus
Benefits
- Competitive base salary
- Meal tickets - 40 RON per working day
- 2 Wellness hours per month plus a 274 RON gross monthly wellness allowance or the option to swap the wellness allowance for a 7Card subscription
- 25 days of paid vacation time in addition to national holidays, plus the option to buy a further 5 days annual leave
- Company part-funded private health insurance and eye care allowance
- Life insurance (3 times base salary)
- Company stock options package
- Eligible for discretionary annual bonus
- Employee Assistance Programme - 24/7 helpline for your wellbeing
- Learning and development allowance of 1,730 RON annually
- Hybrid way of working - we’re all in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays
- Company provided breakfast & snacks on office days
- Early Finish Fridays - log off at 3 PM on a Friday if you have completed your tasks by then
- Our own office space with a great working environment
- You will love what you do – waking up every day solving one of the biggest social problems of our generation - food waste
- Committed team members with broad experience who share a common passion to build a world class business