UW Technology
We're building the UK's leading multi-service provider through just the right mix of innovative design and product engineering.
Building on 20 years industry experience and knowledge, we have already identified massive opportunities for data and technology to improve our business but are only just scratching the surface.
Find out more about what makes us so unique.
Which? Utilities Brand of the Year 2020
How we work
We've been evolving our approach as we've grown, we're already seeing the benefits all across the business of the transformation. Now as we head into the new world we're continuing to grow our teams but we remain committed to our culture.
Our Culture Principles:
- We want to operate in a less heavy way, reduce delays and make things simpler.
- We’re still scaling, we’ve seen massive growth across the business, our data journey is well underway with the team growing steadily and several new teams spinning up in technology.
- We deliver quickly by keeping processes light and enabling autonomy, happy in the knowledge people will be challenged on their ideas.
- We don’t appreciate egos, shouting the loudest doesn’t make your idea the best instead we believe in debate, collaboration and learning.
- We encourage experimenting, seeing failure as learning, believing it’s about being pragmatic and achieving a balance between speed and quality.
- We believe that not every industry or product has to be exciting on the outside for the engineering challenge to be interesting.
- We care about how we deliver and who we work with, we enjoy working on interesting problems with smart people and that if it was easy it wouldn't be fun.
Leadership
We're lucky to have leaders who believe in doing things the right way, that this is just how things should be done and want to provide the best possible environment for engineers. We’ve never believed in ivory tower leadership. Our leadership team are hands-on, roll up their sleeves when needed types, that mentor and support not only from a technical standpoint.
Damon Petta
Chief Technology Officer
Damon joined UW at the beginning of 2016 as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. He’s responsible for building UW's technology infrastructure and products to future-proof the company for our Partners, Members and staff, in an ever-changing digital landscape.
With an extensive 20-year technology career spanning both large companies and entrepreneurial early-stage startups, Damon transformed technology problems into new opportunities for many household names, including AT&T Interactive and Yahoo.
Mike Donat
VP of Engineering
Mike joined UW in early 2016 to help kick start the transformation. Bringing a wealth of experience start-ups, fintech and consulting Mike's understanding of all things web has proved invaluable.
Damon's often described Mike as a Commando, there is no situation you can't drop him into. His fantastic ability to solve the hardest challenges blended with a relentless attitude has been fundamental in growing the engineering team and delivering the transformation to where we are today.
Martin Garton
Chief Technical Architect
Martin joined UW late 2016 as Chief Technical Architect. With a number of successful years in tech leadership at the FT he brings a mobile first pedigree.
A firm believer is Event Sourcing, BDD and clean code, Martin has helped shape the modern architecture here at UW that has unpicked the previous monolith leading us to our cloud native approach.
Here is what our team have to say:
Our Tools
We want to use the best tools for the job, our teams have autonomy but also take responsibility for technology choices. We value decoupling and avoid vendor lock-in at every opportunity. Our systems are eventually consistent, event sourced, designed after our business domain and deployed in a distributed, micro architecture.
By popular choice we are primarily a go house with frontend powered mostly by typescript rolled react/graphql duo; we like experimenting, there’s more rust and WASM coming up; but you will also find staples like python or java.
We’re into cloud native and kubernetes, if it Dockerizes it fits, some examples include: cockroachdb, tikv, pql, mongo for storage; kafka, nats for brokers; thanos, grafana, graylog for instrumentation; kustomize, kube-applier, traefik for deployment and operations.
If it can be open- sourced, it shall. If we can submit a PR instead of building our own, we will. Getting your hands dirty from the top to the bottom of the stack isn’t a promise to be broken, it’s a requirement. If you’re only good at parts of it that’s okay, we’ll support you getting good at all of it.
Benefits
- Competitive Salary and stock options in a growing FTSE250 business 📈
- Beautiful modern, open-plan office with pairing/ standing desks for everybody and floor to ceiling windows offering views over London 🏢
- Subsidised Canteen for all you meat, vegetarian and vegan needs!🍅🥗
- Contributory pension that gets better with time, starting at 4% over time you can get up to 10%⏱
- Flexible working, we’ve got fully remote teams, onsite, early risers and late night grinders, for us it matters what we’re working on more than where. 👩🏽💻
- Opt in to subsidised private healthcare with our company Bupa scheme. 🚑
- Put something aside for a rainy day with our Save as you earn share purchase scheme. ☔️
- Pool tables, ping pong and sleep pods in our breakout space 🎱😴🏓
- Join us in our 140 seater auditorium for movie nights or join in our old school gaming nights 🎬🎮
- Quarterly socials, our most recent was All Star Lanes bowling and Karaoke 🎳🎤
- Mentors and Teachers a plenty, with so many brilliant minds in one place there is always someone you can lean on for support and
- guidance. 👩🏻🏫🙋🏻♂️🤷🏾♂️
- Choose your own tools, whether its hardware of software, you choose the tools you need to get your job done🖥🛠🧰
- Onsite parking with 350+ spaces🚘🚘
- Feeling stressed? We have an employee assistance helpline and company nurse onsite to help look after our teams physical and mental health.☎️👩🏽⚕️
- 25 days holiday + bank holidays✈️
- Discount on our services⚡️💡