closed vacancy Senior Front End Engineer (super early stage startup) / remote / Europe

Joining as only the third full-time engineer after Alex Nunes, CTO and co-founder, you will play a critical role in taking over ownership of our front-end code bases (Chrome extension and website), engineering practices and technology mix. You will be expected to play a significant part in shaping overall engineering culture and hiring other great engineers. The current front-end stack is built with React.js, ES6 and a growing Tailwind CSS footprint with a fairly usual suspect modern toolchain of github, Webpack, Jest, Storybook, CircleCI, CloudFront, Sentry and Datadog, 

The back-end is built with Python, Flask, Redis, Dynamo, EC2, S3 and sprinklings of GCP. A desire to contribute to back-end API implementation is welcomed if full stack feature ownership is strongly desired as a preferred way of working, but is very far from an essential requirement. 

About you

You want your next role to have a real and direct impact on improving the lives of our teacher and student users, who - like all of us - are trying to navigate the new pandemic reality. 

You are now a committed remotie (and maybe that happened during the pandemic). Remote work is not for everyone. Stop reading if you severely miss the camaraderie but also the distractions and presenteeism of working in an office. 

Over the past few roles, the feedback you have been accruing from colleagues and managers is that of a stellar contributor and collaborator. Not only do you consistently turn in great work at a startup pace, but you are a supportive and constructive team player who makes everyone better and happier around you. 

You not only turn out great code but have a passion for usable, beautiful, delightful UX. You are mildly obsessive about tight CSS, pixel-perfect design, stutters and frame rates. We don’t currently employ full time UX so you will be expected to embrace, extend and probably ultimately replace our web design language. You already have a personal portfolio website where you showcase your UX/UI mastery.

You gravitate to high levels of ownership. We’re a tiny team, there is little room to cherry pick more interesting work from yak shaving. You like to immerse yourself in a codebase, becoming familiar over time with its many corners, banking many small wins, zooming out occasionally to question and explore priorities, while regularly tending to the weeds of technical debt that need refactoring to keep the codebase clean and productive.

You are intellectually curious about the world, the business you work in and your craftsmanship. We don’t pretend to have all or even most of the answers around how to make our product more delightful and useful to users, we’ve just had a good and lucky start. You will not only challenge us to come up with better solutions to satisfy user needs but keep pushing us to use smarter tools, technologies and processes to efficiently achieve that goal.

You are comfortable with ambiguity and risk. We are at the relative beginning of our startup journey, we have some early conviction and confidence on a few questions, but there is much detail and optimisation to be worked out as we go along. You will be expected to make reasonable guesses on many questions, rather than relying on others around you to fill in all the gaps. We will all be wrong often, but as long as our hypotheses and assumptions are explicit and testable, we can learn as we go along.

You are opinionated but not dogmatic, your opinions can be changed with new data, experiments or respectful debate. Feedback is the core of our business, so you should be willing and able to give and receive constructive and actionable feedback

You can hit the ground running here and now. You have in-depth, hands-on knowledge of React.js, ES6, JavaScript, CSS, Webpack, with strong web networking and browser performance fundamentals. Knowledge of other, maybe shinier - things is nice too (eg TypeScript, Vue.js, Elm, WASM) but only useful if you’re able to persuade yourself, and the team, that they justify their switching or introduction costs. Knowledge of Chrome extension development is desirable but not essential (the relative learning curve is not that great).