Senior Software Engineer / Dev Team Lead - Remote
Salary: £75,000 to £95,000
Benefits: Private health insurance, Nest pension scheme, competitive holiday allowance, home office equipment and more
Experience: minimum seven years in a related role, of which two in a team lead/management role
Type: f/t (37.5hrs) or p/t (4-day week, 32hrs) and flexitime policy
Location: Remote (occasional travel to London)
About the role
We are looking to augment our fully-remote multi-disciplinary product development and engineering team with a Senior Software Engineer / Dev Team Lead (or Deputy Team Lead), who relishes crafting elegant solutions to hard technical and business problems using whatever is the best tool for the job.
The successful candidate will support our dev team in furthering our mission to provide access to the best journalism from a wide plurality of sources.
Please note: candidates who apply may alternatively be considered for a Senior Software Engineer / Deputy Dev Team Lead position.
You and your skills
The right candidate will:
- Be highly numerate and analytical, backed by a mathematics, computer science, stats or physics degree (or equivalent experience)
- Have excellent high-level language coding skills in any of e.g. Perl, Python, C/C++, Go, Rust, NodeJS, Java and a language-agnostic attitude
- Have experience of Perl, Python 3 and NodeJS and a willingness to work with these or learn them fast
- Have strong scripting skills (Bash, Perl, Python)
- Have excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to engage authoritatively in technical discussions around the specifications of projects
- Be confident with Linux server/system administration
- Have experience with containerised workloads using Docker
- Bring a strong appetite for learning new skills and be open to new technologies, but not a slave to them
- Have two years experience of training, mentoring and running teams on a sprint system and be willing to lead or deputise
The right candidate will also have understanding and experience of at least 3 of the following:
- Natural language processing
- Designing and implementing distributed or large-scale systems
- MySQL/SQL database design, query optimisation
- Using or evaluating ML models in Keras, Tensorflow or Torch
- Basic web development skills e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue/React
- Apache web server software and related modules
- Cloud platforms and concepts (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
- Setup, testing and administration of CI/CD pipelines
- Networking and firewalling
Responsibilities
Leading, supporting and motivating the development team
- Helping allocate work to individual developers, keeping a focus on business priorities and how they further the company's mission
- Supporting team members in their work and learning
- Fostering a collaborative environment and exploratory approach
- Monitoring, assessing and reporting on team progress and performance
Design, build and implementation
- Developing and maintaining a detailed understanding of, and striving to become an authority on, all NewsNow's systems and languages
- Scoping, designing and developing across frontend and especially backend subsystems
- Upholding standards (e.g. in maintainability, security, scalability, efficiency)
- Squashing all the bugs other developers cannot
Contributing towards monitoring, maintenance and administration of our production stack
- Dell R630/R640 servers running Debian Linux and containerised workloads (Docker Swarm)
- Replicated databases (MySQL) and volume management using LVM and ZFS
- Firewall (iptables/nftables) and dynamic routing protocols (BGP, OSPF)
- Participation in on-call rotation, resolving production outages
On-the-job training will be provided on the specific application of these technologies in our stack.
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.
About NewsNow
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.
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.