Full Stack Developer - Fully Remote

Salary: £55k+ (dependent on experience)
Benefits: Competitive salary and bonuses, private health insurance, Nest pension scheme, competitive holiday allowance, home office equipment and more (UK)
Experience: Minimum three years in a related role
Type: Full-time/part-time/flexible working
Location: Remote (occasional travel to London)

About the role

NewsNow is a rare UK-based .com success story: a news organisation using technology to support and promote credible, independent and public interest journalism, via the extremely successful news aggregation and discovery platform NewsNow.co.uk.

Founded in 1997 to democratise and disrupt the market for news, NewsNow has since become a global top 50 news website with millions of loyal users who discover news from thousands of publishers.

The organisation is looking to augment its fully-remote multi-disciplinary product development and engineering team with a Full Stack Developer, to support us in our mission to provide free access to the best journalism from a plurality of sources.

The right candidate will:

• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to engage authoritatively in technical discussions around the specifications of projects
• Be proficient in building websites in HTML5, CSS3, SCSS, JavaScript/ES6+ and responsive design using Flexbox, CSS Grid, taking account of SEO and Core Web Vitals considerations
• Be highly experienced in Vue 2/3 (or React or Angular) and build tools (e.g. Webpack, Babel, etc)
• Be proficient in Node.js or other high-level languages such as PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, Java or Perl
• Have experience of MySQL/SQL
• Be confident with basic Linux command line (e.g. package installation/configuration, bash scripting, git)
• Bring a strong appetite to learn new skills
• Be comfortable and confident with fully remote working

The following would also be an advantage:

• MySQL/SQL database design, query optimisation
• Docker/Docker Swarm
• Advanced Debian Linux (e.g. distribution upgrades, filesystems)
• Natural language processing
• Cloud platforms and concepts (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
• CI/CD pipelines
• Networking and firewalling

Responsibilities

• Scoping, designing and developing new features across our entire backend and frontend stack
• Reviewing other developers' work
• Investigating bug reports and editorial team queries
• Participation in on-call rotation, monitoring and resolving production outages, administration of servers, containers and toolchains

On-the-job training will be provided on the specific application of these technologies in our stack.

About NewsNow

NewsNow is a news organisation that uses technology to filter and present news in real time, from thousands of sources, on thousands of topics, to millions of users, 24 hours a day.

NewsNow's site features content on a wide range of subjects, including current affairs, business and entertainment, and we are a go-to destination for football and sports fans. Everything we do is driven by our core mission, to support and promote credible and independent public interest journalism.

We want to change the way people read the news, getting them to adopt a healthy news diet by reading widely outside their comfort zone, and we want to foster and support news that is written in the public interest, by publishers who are free, independent and well-supported.

We believe that news is an essential element of a democratic society, and we want to play a role in making sure it serves that function well. We are a unique fusion of editorial with technology, driven by a desire to provide quality content, and not by a need to mine our users' attention at all costs. Our technology is always at the service of our editorial standards, and not the reverse.

NewsNow is a family-friendly organisation that recognises the importance of a healthy work-life balance and, along with many other benefits, supports this through a flexible working pattern that allows you to choose when you start and finish work.

About our Development team

Our highly experienced multi-disciplinary development team runs lean. Our compact set-up lets us keep hierarchy and bureaucracy to a minimum. Which means today, we're still a company where everyone gets to make a massive impact.

We're a developer-driven company. Two of the company's three directors are developers — and that includes the CEO. This means that development is core to the business, developers are appreciated for their creative input, and the importance of investment in development — and avoiding technical debt — is understood.

We use a cutting-edge containerised development model, that makes agile development convenient and cheap, using Dockside, our online IDE. For each new task, Dockside lets us launch a disposable development container — aka a devtainer — which provides a self-contained fully-functioning development environment running a full live NewsNow stack (talking to a disposable live database clone) complete with high-end browser-based VS Code-compatible IDE. This makes forking, staging and code-review a breeze. From conception through roll out, branches and staged developments are continuously available as needed to developers, managers and testers for collaboration, feedback and review. (Learn more about our open-sourced Dockside on GitHub).

We run Debian Linux, Apache, MySQL with Python 3, Perl 5, and Node on the server-side, with TensorFlow/Keras for ML, and HTML5, CSS3 (SASS/SCSS) and modern JavaScript (OO ES6+ & Vue.js framework) on the client-side.

All our software is containerised and deployed using Docker Swarm services on our own co-located raw metal or in Google Cloud.

Our Culture

• Open: we share and collaborate within and across departments
• Rigorous: We like to be clear about what we're doing, and why. Experimentation and peer-review are in our DNA
• One team, one vision: no office politics
• An appreciative environment: expect to hear 'thanks' a lot
• Room to grow: development of skills and responsibilities is encouraged and rewarded
• Virtual: we are today a fully-remote company with occasional in-person get-togethers
• Family-friendly and flexible: we offer flexible working, and understand sometimes personal needs come first

Apply now

If this interests you, get in touch and tell us about yourself. We’re hiring continuously so there’s never a bad time to say hello.