Our web application is at the heart of our busy and successful e-commerce business; every day it serves millions of product images and handles hundreds of thousands of user visits, but we can and do update the live site with new code multiple times per day without missing a beat. Our systems are written on the LAMP stack and deployed on Amazon Web Services using Puppet and Capistrano; we are migrating to Symfony 2 as our MVC framework. Developers choose the tools that work best for them - for instance, at the moment we have a mix of Linux and Mac workstations in the team. We are adopting and adapting agile development techniques such as test-driven development, pair programming, and continuous integration. We hold regular retrospectives to improve our working environment. Our developers are generalizing specialists whose typical day may include refining an algorithm, writing a tricky integration test, tuning a SQL query, and discussing feature nuances with a product manager. Our team is growing fast and we'd like to hear (at careers@secretsales.com) from any of you who'd like to join us; we're hiring for all technical roles, especially developers of all levels of experience.
Established in London in July 2007, Secretsales.com is the UK's leading private shopping club, offering limited-time online sales with current name-brand goods at deep discounts. Brands include fashion, beauty, homeware, and lifestyle categories, many of them familiar from the high street. The company has about eighty employees and a substantial annual turnover; it was recently selected to join the UK's Future Fifty programme for the country's most rapidly growing startups.