JavaScript Job: Senior Web Developer

Salary: up to £80,000 (according to experience and location — see our remuneration policy)
Type: full-time/part-time/contract
Location: 100% remote, GMT +/- 2
Visa: tier 2 sponsorship available
Closing date: 30th June 2022

About NewsNow
Join us on our mission to make news serve people better — because a healthy society needs a healthy news diet.

NewsNow — now in its 25th year — 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.

NewsNow presents curated and breaking headlines from around the world for people who want to stay abreast of topics they are passionate about, weigh up differing presentations of the facts and viewpoints, and challenge their preconceptions all as they make up their own minds.

We believe what we do helps make society better, but huge challenges remain. Now, in this era of fake news and polarisation, and as we proudly enter our 25th year, our social mission to support and promote credible, independent and public interest journalism is more important than ever.

About the role
We are seeking a highly-experienced developer to join our fully-remote multi-disciplinary product development and engineering team:

• Enhancing the functionality of the website through development of Vue.js components and the associated API backend;
• Collaborating with other members of our product development and engineering team in our lean and iterative development approach;
• Reviewing other developers' code.

Our priorities for 2022 include:

• Building out and optimising our entirely new design built in Vue.js, which represents the biggest upgrade to NewsNow's format in its nearly 25-year history;
• Evolving into a social news site by crowdsourcing feedback and ratings from users to drive quality and user-centric improvements;
• Implementing various mobile initiatives, such as the development of a progressive web application (PWA) and push notifications to not only make accessing NewsNow easier, but also put us at the forefront of peoples' minds at critical moments;
• Continuing our social mission to provide a healthy news diet through publishing headlines linking to breaking and curated news from a diverse range of credible, independent and public interest news sources.

You and your skills
You will be able to quickly grasp our existing Vue.js app and server-side systems and be proficient in spoken and written English so that you can contribute authoritatively and collaborate effectively.

Required skills:

• Prowess in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/ES6+ and responsive design
• Vue.js (or solid experience working with React or Angular)

In addition, some of these would be nice to have:

• Flexbox and CSS Grid
• Configuring and optimising Webpack builds
• Measuring and improving web page performance (Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights)
• Vue.js SSR
• HTTP and CORS
• SEO

• Node.js or other high-level languages such as PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, Java or Perl
• OO programming principles
• MySQL/SQL
• Familiarity with the Linux command line, bash and Git
• Design skills (we use Figma)

You’re also someone who:

• Is comfortable with fully remote working
• Is open to new technologies and concepts, but isn’t a slave to them: you relish crafting elegant solutions to hard technical and business problems, using whatever is the best tool for the job
• Thrives in a small, open and collaborative team, where the best ideas can come from anyone. You’re confident and articulate about what you know and open about what you don’t
• Is passionate about any area of news or sport, or creating the best product for people who are

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.

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 understand sometimes personal needs come first

Our remuneration policy
NewsNow is an exceptionally stable business that values long-term relationships with its employees. As an incentive to join NewsNow, we will look to offer candidates their current market rate or above.

Furthermore, we run a programme of annual (or even more frequent) appraisals and pay reviews, with the aim of ensuring our employees are motivated, fulfilled, and that their remuneration reflects and recognises their developing expertise (whether transferable skills, or knowledge of our particular stack), their value to NewsNow, and on the wider job market.

Benefits
All our positions are fully remote - work from home 100% of the time. We offer flexible working for all team members (we’re a family-friendly company) with occasional in-person meetups. Furthermore, we provide:

• UK-resident employees with an annual bonus, private health insurance, a competitive holiday allowance, home office equipment, and more - please ask.
• Non-UK-resident employees or contractors with benefits according to their location and employee status - please ask.

More about NewsNow
NewsNow is the UK’s largest independent news aggregation and discovery platform. A one-stop shop for news for 12m unique monthly visitors, NewsNow is a UK top 50 website, and a global top 50 news destination.

Running stably and profitably since our start in 1997, since 2009 we've been ad funded — experiencing great commercial success as an industry leader in programmatic advertising technologies — however today we are actively exploring how, together with other news organisations, we can move towards a future where public interest news and journalism is funded sustainably by the people it serves.

NewsNow is led by a gender-diverse technically-minded board. Of our three directors, two — including the CEO/Managing Director — are developers, and one is female.

The company is proud of its place within the media ecosystem, providing a platform particularly for smaller and independent publications to reach their audience, and helping to grow media plurality. We are a driver of quality in the news media and today set editorial standards for much of the content we link to.

NewsNow is also very proud to be the first digital member of the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Rapid Response Network, which helps alert the UK public efficiently to its vital humanitarian emergency fundraising appeals.

Job Types: Full-time, Part-time, Permanent, Fixed term contract
Contract length: 12 months
Part-time hours: 40 per week

Salary: Up to £80,000.00 per year

Additional pay:

• Yearly bonus

Benefits:

• Company pension
• Flexible schedule
• Private medical insurance
• Work from home

Schedule:

• Monday to Friday