The Opportunity
Shorthand is a growing company that provides a digital publishing platform to many of the world’s best-known publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there’s never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has a rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being comfortably profitable. We're a small team of geeks with art and heart, and a high bar for quality.
To deliver our magic to customers and their audiences, we build software that is scalable, flexible, reliable and as simple as possible but no simpler.
We tend to do things a little differently at Shorthand. For one thing, we’re a small, fully remote team distributed around the world. For this role, we’ll happily take applications from anywhere in North or South America, but applicants must be fluent in English.
The Role
This role will be primarily responsible for designing, engineering and supporting our customer integrations systems and services. You'll be glueing together our great storytelling product with our customers’ content management systems and with our third-party providers like Google and Apple to create a seamless experience. Some integrations are backend API related (including Drupal/WordPress and other CMS module development), but most are focused on frontend JavaScript/TypeScript and Google AMP. A secondary but important aspect of the role is advancing Shorthand’s automated testing coverage.
We are looking for someone who:
- Is whip-smart, as demonstrated by career achievements and/or school/university results
- Has great communication skills, particularly with respect to writing and interacting directly with technical and non-technical customers (sometimes across US and European timezones).
- Has good knowledge of cloud-based web architectures, web crawlers, SEO, and frontend web performance optimisation.
- Experienced in system design and system integration.
- Has a wide range of experience and expertise across languages, frameworks and approaches such as JavaScript, TypeScript, and ReactJS, NodeJS, scripting, and serverless.
- Is an expert in using git.
- Has worked with CI/CD processes before (CircleCI/GitHub Actions preferably).
- Is experienced using test automation tools (Cypress, Jest, React Testing Library, Percy preferably).
- Is experienced with Drupal module and WordPress plugins development, especially in integration with third-party APIs.
- Has an extremely high bar for quality.
- Is thorough and detail-oriented.
- Can learn fast.
- Gains deep satisfaction from helping to make products better.
- Has experience of working in a small business or startup environment.
- Preferably has experience collaborating with diverse, geographically-dispersed teams.
Core Responsibilities:
- Own customer integrations development including reusable third-party integrations (like WordPress plugins and Drupal modules) and JavaScript embedding solutions, publishing destinations (Google AMP, AWS S3, Akamai and others), as well as bespoke tailored customer-specific integrations.
- Work directly with customers through the whole lifecycle of delivery.
- Mature Shorthand automated testing capabilities to help improve product quality and team safety.
- Provide high tier support especially for custom systems integrations.
- Learn, evolve and improve an existing application/system architecture.
- Review code from other engineers and provide feedback.
- Help secure the environment.
- Contribute to the technical direction of the Shorthand tool.
- Report bugs.
- Communicate with the customer support team and customers to suggest solutions to issues.
- Assist in the creation of product documentation when required.
Qualifications:
- A minimum of 5 years of experience in Software Engineering roles.
- A minimum of 3 years of experience in web application development.
- Thorough knowledge of NodeJS and the web.
- Experience with AWS.
- University qualification in computer science or a closely related field, or equivalent career experience required.
Personality Attributes:
- You are a proactive self-starter, who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful in order to find solutions to any challenge.
- You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment and possess a high level of intellectual curiosity.
- You are collaborative.
- You find fulfilment in the job itself, and happiness in a job well done.