Comparethemarket.com opens Shoreditch office to attract 40 IT hipsters

Want to earn £94k working for Aleksandra Orlov, but don't want to move to Peterborough? Come this way...

Insurance comparison website Comparethemarket.com is hiring staff to fill a new London office in Shoreditch, east London, in a bid to attract IT staff who might not otherwise be persuaded to move to Peterborough.

The office opened just before Christmas and the aim, according to the company's information technology director James Lomas, is to hire as many as 20 user experience, product and technical staff by the spring and "nearer 40" by summer.

The current open roles at the London office include a senior big-data development lead with a salary package of up to £94,000 per annum; a senior front-end software engineer offered on a salary of up to £65,000; a technical lead on up to £85,000 per year; and a senior data scientist role offered with a "high competitive" salary.

"We're looking for people who enjoy working in teams and who love tech. Our initial hires will focus on native mobile app development and front-end skills (that is to say, HTML5 and CSS3). But we're generally after people who exhibit an attitude to learning that mirrors ours, with our internal career framework, the 'Path2Awesomeness', who want to unleash their inner awesomeness!" Lomas told Computing.

He continued: "The teams will be working on some great projects and products; our current Meerkat Movies App has more than one million downloads, and we're planning a bunch of cool features to help people make the most of their 2-for-1 cinema tickets."

Lomas admitted that in an increasingly tight market for skilled IT staff one of the motives for the initiative was to attract employees to Comparethemarket.com who might not otherwise be keen on working at the company's head offices on the outskirts of Peterborough.

"The London office gives us access to an entirely new pool of people who want to work in London. This is totally understandable - London ranks alongside New York as one of the most innovative and entrepreneurial tech cities in the world. This isn't about a wholesale move though, rather it's about creating new teams in Shoreditch to complement teams located at our Peterborough office.

"The office will primarily house user experience, product and technical staff, and will also be used by other companies within BGL Group, the parent company behind Comparethemarket.com," said Lomas.