What you'll be doing:
As a Senior Full Stack Developer (with front-end focus), you’ll be responsible for:
- Building solutions to problems (especially solutions with a heavy front-end focus)
- Design of the solution (in conjunction with Product Managers and/or other colleagues)
- Helping colleagues facing issues with front-end development
Day-to-day life on the Product Development team looks like:
- Most of your time will be spent designing and building solutions.
- For our tech stack we use:
- Django/Django REST Framework/Postgres for backend,
- Angular for our web application,
- Flutter for our mobile application (replacing our current Ionic/Angular app later this year),
- and for infrastructure we use AWS ECS/ECR, Aurora and Lambda.
- For design, it’s quick brainstorming, a bit of analysis, sketching on paper or Figma, and/or jotting down a short design doc in Google Docs
- A chunk of time is spent on understanding issues, users and our platform. This includes talking to ops colleagues. We take turns answering ops support requests
It’s fast paced. We’re light on overhead and don’t outsource quality to a QA team. Quality, maintainability and security start at the design stage and are everyone’s responsibility.
We run 2-week sprints. Each day starts with a daily 15-minute standup and then it varies a lot from there. The issues vary from sprint-to-sprint. It’s typically very user focused, but we do make time each quarter to do unsexy important stuff (refactor, pay down technical debt, database upgrades, etc).
It’s not a solo effort. While we maximise the time you must put your head down and get on with cracking a problem, we grab each other for help every day. And we do peer review of design and code, while building and deploying to production regularly.
If you like having a holistic view of the product (from idea to release to growth), rather than being highly specialised in one niche, you'll probably enjoy this role.
What we're looking for:
- General characteristics
- You like solving real problems. When you make something, you make it to solve someone’s issue. You understand the issue and the person facing it. You put in a bit of extra effort to make it a good experience for the user
- Uncertainty is a fun problem to figure out, rather than an annoying headache. When you don’t know the answer, you try something. You experiment. You dig.
- You’re a clear concise communicator. When writing or speaking, you know which details to prioritise
- KISS is important to you. You have an instinct for when a solution is too complicated for the problem
- You know how to learn and skill up. When faced with a novel skill area, you can self- critique your level and push yourself to improve
- You reside in the UK and don't need visa sponsorship
- If you don’t live near Oxford, you are able to travel and work in our office in Oxford for a few days each quarter
- Specific characteristics for this role
- Taken multiple features from idea to release to growth
- Having spent meaningful time as part of different teams (we’d prefer at least 6 years as a developer)
- Deep front-end experience, including responsive design, for consumer facing businesses
- Design sense for UX/UI. Not just writing code. May have done wireframes before.
- Can look at an interface and tell if it is terrible or not
- Some experience working on backend (e.g. building APIs, database design, etc)
- Some experience with CI/CD or deployments in general
- Ideally, some experience in an agency (for consumer facing apps) and/or early-stage
consumer facing startup
- Bonus points if you have experience of mobile development, whether native or through a cross-platform framework like Flutter/React Native/Ionic
