About Candide

What we do

Who are Candide? (a brief history)
Candide began in 2017 and has taken on many guises over the years. Throughout each evolution we’ve had a singular mission to allow gardeners and the gardening sector as a whole to take advantage of modern technology and help their businesses prosper.
From our award winning proprietary Plant ID technology, our custom-built Public Gardens admissions system, our unique won’t-find-it-anywhere-else Plant Marketplace to our vibrant Social Network for plant lovers around the world; there is no stone we have left unturned.
The next chapter for Candide is just as exciting… we’re doing it all again, but with a twist. This time around, instead of providing general services to the sector we are focussing on the use cases of our most innovative Garden clients alone. Candide’s renewed impetus is to empower these trail blazers to be all they can be and tap the true potential of the technology we’ve built. These gardens include Babylonstoren in South Africa, The Newt In Somerset in the UK, Vignamaggio in Italy and a few more yet to be revealed (but equally dazzling)! Our clients aren’t your average park walkabout, they are sophisticated, connected, pristine examples of closed-loop farm-to-plate businesses with vast complexity. Our technology runs their membership schemes, manages their restaurants, integrates with their hotel booking and touches just about every part of a visitor’s experience - we even provide their wifi. But Candide’s vision for our clients doesn’t stop there, next up we are revamping their ecommerce engine and building companion native mobile apps to help take their operations to the next level.

Why Work For Us

Love gardens? So do we.

Our Culture

You will be initially joining our team to provide a series of mobile apps to our clients before merging with our South African branch to revamp the ecommerce engine driving our client’s growth. The work will be incredibly varied and you will be expected to work on all aspects of our technology stack from databases, deployments, services, third-party integrations and ultimately to our customer-facing front-ends.
Helping Candide to deliver these projects will mean you will have the option to travel and work on-site with our clients to see how well your systems stand-up to real-world stresses.

Our Engineering Processes

Our entire stack is written in TypeScript. The front-end apps use Angular and React Native, backed by a GraphQL API. We have a growing number of microservices written in Node.js, running serverless in Google Cloud Platform. We use RDBMS stores by default and other services (e.g. ElasticSearch and Redis) where relevant. As much as possible, our infrastructure is defined using Terraform.
We use Gitlab for continuous integration and deployment, taking advantage of feature branch deployments to verify behaviour and promoting to production several times a day.
We like types and tests to help us produce working and maintainable code, making use of immutability and pure functions where practical. Our focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery allow us to rapidly iterate, deploying new versions of our services many times each day.
Our robust testing and monitoring allow for stress-free deployments and to discover, debug and fix problems in production. We use GCP’s own tools to monitor logs, create alerts, visualise metrics and analyse request traces across our microservices. We have automated smoke tests that run against production in addition to the tests which run in CI.

Our Hiring Process

A successful application typically involves: A short phone interview with paired programming exercise, An on-site interview at one of our Gardens or Office with a few engineers.