Teams at #SMRnov19: Meet heycar

Guest Post, Next event | | 4 min read

heycar are one of the hundreds of awesome teams hiring this weekend at Silicon Milkroundabout. Have a read up on some of the great projects they’re working on and stop by and say hi to them at stand 202.

Who we are
heycar is a new used car online marketplace, launched in the UK in August 2019. Our aim is to disrupt the market on a large scale, offering a best-in-class user experience. heycar brings quality to the used car market, regardless of your needs, only listing used cars from top dealers. All cars are under 8 years old, have less than 100,000 miles on the clock and every car comes with a dealer warranty, an inspection and a full history check. This gives customers the certainty and clarity to make a confident decision in a market that lacks trust.

We exist simply to help people find a car they’ll love, and to help dealers sell more cars. Car buyers find the buying process cumbersome, intimidating and fear the unknown history and reliability of used cars. Dealers find it increasingly challenging to reach buyers in ways that reflect their expectations and increasingly digital purchasing habits. heycar will seek to solve meaningful problems to improve the car buying experience on both sides, with the ambition of becoming the ‘go-to’ for both buyers and dealers alike.

Our business is kind of unique – we have the thinking and deep resources of an established business with the mentality of a start-up. Being backed by two automotive legends, VW Group and Daimler, allows us to establish partnerships with industry leaders and experts.

What you could be working on
Being a start-up = lots to do. We’re always working to grow and develop our offerings, so there’s absolutely no shortage of work!

On our site we launched the ‘Value my car’ and ‘Comparison’ tools which takes detailed customer journey, product usage and development planning. We’ve got our first business-wide hackathon (or as we like to call it ‘hey-ckathon’) coming up in December! Our Product, Engineering and Design teams are always at the forefront of new developments. Marketing and branding tasks regularly need the support of our tech team so there’s lots to get involved in. Being in a young, energetic and empowering start-up such as heycar gives you the chance to take the lead on anything you want. We strive on having an open-minded, solution driven environment with opportunity for all. We’re only at the start of our journey which means there are endless possibilities and scope for you to grow. Our Backend team recently worked on an internal project called ‘Ingestion 2.0’, which completely updated the way we get our dealer’s inventory onto the heycar. This project focused on making the upload smoother and quicker. This is an incredible achievement and a big benefit to our dealers as well as our business – we saw a massive 30% improvement is listings on heycar!

heycar’s workspace

Why we enjoy working here
Heycar has a great working culture where your ideas are listened to and we utilise collaborative working in its most exciting form. Being part of something so new means that the team can move quickly to capitalise on winning ideas.

We have a vibrant engineering culture which focuses on collaboration, best practices, and finding solutions to challenging problems. We use a fresh frontend stack  (SSR, latest React APIs, Styled components, Storybook) and are constantly trying to improve our day-to-day developer experience with the code we write. One of our engineers said: “I’m excited about the possibilities within what is a well-funded and ambitious startup. There is an exciting roadmap of features on the horizon and we are working hard to make the platform scalable, performant and engaging.”

The people are amazing, there is a real sense of team here – there is enthusiasm and support from all corners. We work hard but still find time to celebrate our successes – we also throw fantastic socials!

What does the team look like?
We’re a small but mighty team, made up of Commercial, Product, Marketing, Engineering, HR, Finance and Design. We are growing at speed and building a collaborative culture that lets team members feel challenged and empowered to make changes quickly. We all have different backgrounds, industry experience and skills which help us to drive towards the same goal of disrupting the used car industry. 

Who we’re hoping to meet at #SMRnov19
This is our first time at Silicon Milkroundabout so we’re really excited to see who we’ll connect with at this event! We’re hoping to meet some great people who are excited to join a start-up looking to really make a difference. It will be fun to meet new people and chat about what we’re hoping to achieve in the next year and how you can be a part of it. We’ll be happy to meet people who can offer unique views on how to scale our platform to help us achieve our goal of being the go-to website to buy a used car.

The hottest roles we will be bringing on Sunday will be Mid–Senior Level Front and Back End Developers, CTO and Junior Product Managers.

The view from heycar’s rooftop

What does the hiring process look like at  heycar
The hiring process in our engineering team starts with an initial chat with our recruiter, you’ll then have a face-to-face interview with one of our Senior Managers, followed up by a coding task. You’ll then meet face-to-face with members of the engineering team. The hiring process a great opportunity to explore and bounce new ideas, meet the team, and view London at its best … from our roof top!