We're Hiring

Who Are We

We are indeed hiring

Carhoots is revolutionising the way people review and buy cars online. We’ve been billed as the ‘tripadvisor for cars’ but we think that sounds old fashioned. Our focus and mission is to become the number 1 destination for car users globally, by providing them with everything they need in one fun, trusted and social destination. We have some amazing advisors and investors behind us who recognise the potential and we will be growing rapidly over the next 12 months as we set up camp in Silicon Valley and build on our strong US market.

Our team is small but determined. We work in a fun, relaxed environment where we hustle, move fast, break things, are smart and get shit done. As an early member of our team you have the opportunity to have a say, make a big impact, get noticed and work with a passionate team set on building new innovative products. You’ll not only receive equity in the company but also genuine love and respect from those around you.

We’re located in the heart of Silicon Valley’s startup scene at the Carhoots Crib, a 3 storey hacker house stocked with everything you need to get the job done... unlimited caffeine and nachos, shiny new macs, free pairs of Bose headphones, traditional English beer on tap and a place to crash too (We’re working on the pool and zip line!). We also have a small office near London in the UK. If you do your best work in your shed at 2 in the morning, or at the park, thats fine too.

We’re still a “scruffy” startup, but we mean business, we’re polishing away quickly, getting stuff done and capturing a lot of peoples attention. No matter where you’re located If you want to get your hands dirty, thrive on new challenges and want to be a part of the startup culture, then drop me a line personally at lee@carhoots.com and join us on our journey!

James getting very muddy
As usual James utterly misinterpreted our policy of "getting your hands dirty"
  • Whilst we want to work with great people from anywhere on earth we do need a developer to be based in the US. Our whole team needs to be able to travel sometimes, to our offices, or hot conferences (we were at SXSW this year) or even just for our occasional retreat away in the Alps.

  • No agencies please

Front End Developer

Carhoots is looking for someone in love with web development - a problem solving perfectionist who takes full ownership and responsibility of the product they are creating. You should have strong feelings for UI/UX and design as well as a commitment to building and iterating scalable front-end applications in beautiful code. You’ll collaborate around the creation of new and existing web and mobile features with the backend team and help them in making decisions that resonate with your front-end strategy. You will be the type of person who will feel compelled to jump on your laptop in the pub, and even through beer goggles be able to fix stuff when some widget has gone fubar.

  • Stuff we use and will continue to use, and are essential for you to have used in anger...
    • HTML5, Javascript, JSON, JQuery, Ajax, Git
  • Server side we use...
    • Python mainly - but we can get you trained, PHP is desirable too. Our Blog and CDN is delivered via Google App Engine.
  • Other Javascript stuff we use that can be learned pretty quickly...
    • Backbone.js, Require.js, Isotope, Underscore. Node or PhantomJS, and of course Twitter's Bootstrap (who doesn't!)
  • Other skills and experience...
    • Linux is essential,
    • Any experience with iOS and Android desirable
    • API’s, Automated Web testing (e.g. Selenium) and performance testing.
    • Build processes and CI and DevOps, Hudson, Agile, LAMP (especially Apache config),
    • SEO, Analytics, Nginx
  • What we like:
    • Fast iterative processes, where good quality does not mean reducing burndown, and where failures are as visible as successes.
    • Web developers who are engineers at heart and do things like ‘build’ and ‘branch’ and really know what HTTP is.
    • Ability to switch to new programming languages and learn things fast
    • Ability to discover new things, and teach everyone else.
    • Awesome experiments we can play with!
    • Basic knowledge of Photoshop for slicing, CSS sprites etc. (i.e doesn't need a designer for everything!)
    • Introverts welcome (as long as you do speak when there is something important to communicate, and shout when you just can’t solve that intractable thing!)

Interested? Please apply with a short cover letter to lee@carhoots.com

Back End Developer

Carhoots back end engineer will have a huge impact on how we design, build and deliver the Carhoots experience. You should be more than comfortable embracing the backend software and hardware stack, you have to battle against premature optimisation, and love performance tests. You will be truly passionate about creating scalable solutions and solving back end technical and product challenges at web scale. You know what a node is and when one goes down you take it personally. You will have the opportunity to have a huge impact as an early member of our team and work with technologies such as Riak, Python, Java, MongoDB, Redis, Solr and Hadoop, and understand what ‘The Cloud’ really means. Remember though, we are most interested in you as a person - you must be pure awesome, nothing more.

  • Essential..
    • Python, LAMP (even if your P is rusty), Java, Linux server management. DevOps (as you will be Dev and Ops!), Git
  • It will help if you know any of the following...
    • C, C++ or Go,
  • Any experience of these things would be great, otherwise you will pick them up pretty fast...
    • Rackspace Cloud, EC2, GAE, Nginx, NoSQL eg..Riak, Redis, MongoDB, Memcache, Solr(Lucene), Reporting and data analysis.
  • Other skills and experience...
    • OO, TDD,
    • DNS and Load Balancing
    • Cluster management, e.g. Puppet, Chef, and monitoring, e.g. Munin
    • Map Reduce (e.g. Hadoop),
    • Build processes and CI, Hudson, Agile, LAMP (especially Apache config),
  • What we like:
    • Fast iterative processes, where good quality does not mean reducing burndown, and where failures are as visible as successes.
    • Ability to switch to new programming languages and learn things fast.
    • Ability to discover new things, and teach everyone else.
    • Monitoring and dashboards
    • Awesome personal experiments we can play with!
    • Ugly MVP’s - but still get a thrill when the front-end devs make it into something amazing.
    • Introverts welcome (as long as you do speak when there is something important to communicate, and shout when you just can’t solve that intractable thing!)

Interested? Please apply with a short cover letter to lee@carhoots.com

Front and Back End Developer

Whilst we have mentioned two separate roles - there could be a blazing developer who can do both, or most of one and a bit of the other, either way you’ll be deeply involved in everyone elses work, we take clarity, communication and visibility seriously.

Interested? Please apply with a short cover letter to lee@carhoots.com

Opportunity for Scruffy Interns

We are also looking for smart interns to join us at our Hacker House in Silicon Valley. As an intern the only requirement we expect of you is to get your hands dirty! In return our team will give you all the love and respect you need! You’ll build stuff, you’ll break stuff, you’ll amaze us with your passion and scare us with your ability to get stuff done.!

You won’t be paid mega bucks but just enough to enjoy the Silicon valley startup lifestyle whilst learning the ropes and joining a smart team who want to build great products. We’ll feed you to make sure you have enough energy to last the day (or night if you prefer!). You’ll get a complementary pair of Bose headphones for the occasions you just want to plugin and we regularly go out for dinner and excursions around the valley. Of course, there’ll be an opportunity for a full time role after the internship. We usually ask our interns to “make it impossible for us not to hire you” and we tend to find that works best! We’ve got some really cool and exciting features we have for you to play with and we encourage hacking existing features or creating new ones!

  • Perks
    • Free Accommodation option
    • Unlimited Caffeine, beer and nachos
    • Complimentary Bose headphones
    • Weekly excursions (cinema, hiking, baseball games etc.)
  • The position is full time in San Francisco. We can offer you accommodation at the Carhoots Crib if required...no problem!

Interested? Please apply with a short cover letter to lee@carhoots.com