Solution Engineer

Job Description

Condé Nast has a huge global footprint across 32 countries worldwide with total monthly visitors reaching more than 550 million. We aim to inspire, inform and entertain our audiences through our portfolio of well known brands such as Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, GQ and many other leading brands.

Condé Nast has operations in America, Europe, South America and Asia.

The company is undertaking the biggest transformation in its history, driving towards expanding both its operations and its reach through diversifying the digital business models for our brands. Major areas of focus will include video and streaming platforms, increasing subscriptions and memberships, growing our events business, and ensuring we maintain a high level of standard on the products we are already proud of delivering to our customers. Migrating and consolidating to a more centralised set of technologies and capabilities that can be easily leveraged by any brand or product experience is also a top business priority.

Engineering is responsible for scaling, building, deploying websites that serve over 500 million users globally. The global engineering team includes Product Engineering, Platform Engineering and Core Engineering.

About Platform Engineering

Our mission is to build modern media platforms to serve our omni-channel experiences for our portfolio of global brands such as Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Glamour which currently reaches over 500 million monthly users. We need your help to create new capabilities, and strengthen our existing ones, so that our brands can reach wider audiences through engaging digital experiences.

Quality, performance, experimentation, and speed of delivery are all principles at the heart of what we do as a Platform Engineering group. We have strong capabilities in areas such as editorial tooling, content delivery, design systems, advertising and commerce that we will continue to improve and grow. Our vision is to additionally invest in areas such as video, subscriptions, membership, and next generation editorial tools.

Teams are encouraged to explore creative ideas to meet the Product vision, backed by rigorous techniques. That’s why we have been investing in baking in experimentation into our platforms through a/b and multivariate testing. Currently we run hundreds of experiments in production every day!

You will be working alongside international colleagues across US, London, and India. We strongly emphasise cross-functional working through partnering directly with Product, Data, Design, UX and Delivery.

The Role

We’re looking for a React.js and Node.js engineer, with strong js fundamentals to join our team. We ideally hire engineers who are comfortable across the full stack, but we know you'll have a preference about being on the front- or back-end. As long as you're happy to work on both sets of tasks and willing to learn – you should carry on reading!

Our Tech

●      Languages and Frameworks, in the priority: Javascript, Node.js,  React.js, (Good to have - Ruby, Rails)

●      Data: SQL, MongoDB, GraphQL, Elasticsearch

●      Deployment: Docker, AWS, Kubernetes

●      Source Control: Git, GitHub

How we work

●      We take an agile approach to software development and build our software incrementally and responsively to usage, learning as we go.

●      Infrastructure as Code everywhere.

●      Pairing. We like knowledge sharing and upskilling.

●      Remote friendly. We work with engineers across time zones & locations.

●      Teams are responsible for their own apps and are on-call for emergencies.

Role and responsibilities

●      Working on our collection of Node and Rails apps.

●      Working on our front-end web-based apps, using React and other frameworks.

●      Shipping features and services to millions of customers, multiple times per day.

●      Building scalable and robust software to handle User Generated Content.

●      Collaboratively working with our amazing infrastructure team.

●      Mentoring colleagues at every level, and a willingness to be mentored by them

●      Supporting your Tech Lead and Engineering Manager in technical decision making, solution design, and estimations.

●      Pairing with members of your team to identify the most optimal solution. Regularly conducting code reviews to ensure high standards of engineering quality in the code that we write.

●      Working within a cross-functional team that includes designers, business and product leads, UX engineers, and others.

●      Designing and monitoring metrics and logs. We use Kibana, ElasticSearch and Datadog extensively, but as long as you’re aware of how important observability is, we don’t mind what tools you may have used in the past.

●      Taking part in our 24/7 “On Call” rota to troubleshoot any major operational issues out of hours. Teams are responsible for their own apps availability and reliability.

About you - Essential skills

●      You have a BE / BTech or equivalent experience

●      You’re a software engineer.

●      Expert knowledge of JavaScript, Node.js, and browser technologies.

●      Expert understanding of React.js or other comparable framework and JavaScript testing frameworks and test-driven development.

●      Working understanding of Cloud Native architecture, containerisation, Docker, AWS, CI/CD, and DevOps culture.

●      Practical experience in the use of leading engineering practices and principles.

●      Practical experience of building robust solutions at large scale. We serve traffic in the many millions every month so our products need to scale seamlessly to meet our customer demands.

●      Appreciation for functions of Product and Design, experience working in cross-functional teams.

●      You’ll try to make the codebase nicer for the next person that visits it.

●      You’re someone who’ll own every step of the development process; from refining tickets to shipping the code to production.

●      You’ll do your best, and ask for help when it’s needed.

●      You have an interest or desire to learn about every part of the stack; from the latest JavaScript standards, to GraphQL, to accessibility, and the infrastructure we deploy to.

●      Someone who can communicate in a variety of media (through Slack and in person) effectively within their team, outside of their team, and with people in our product and design families, to even our users.

●      Able to effectively communicate technical concepts to different audiences.

●      Business proficiency in spoken and written English.

About you - Desirable skills

●      Experience of working with international teams across multiple time-zones and a willingness to accommodate those time zones with flexible working hours (with an expectation that your team members will do the same for you)

●      Mentoring and/or management experience

●      Knowledge of and interest in continuous integration, testing strategies, design systems, software architecture, distributed computing, protocol design, data and analytics, user experience, accessibility, internationalisation, scalability and web performance.

●      Experience and/or interest in working with digital advertising

●      Experience and/or interest in working in publishing

●      Experience and/or interest in working with Fashion

●      Proficiency working with a variety of third party APIs and developer tools

Responsibilities: 
* Implementation of a robust set of services / APIs to power the web application 
* Building reusable code and libraries for future use 
* Optimization of the application for maximum speed and scalability 
* Implementation of security and data protection 
* Integration of the front-end and back-end aspects of the web application

Requirements: 
* Proficiency in developing modern web applications using Nodejs & React. 
* Good understanding of Database schema, design, optimisation, scalability. 
* Good understanding of server-side CSS preprocessors. 
* Ability to implement automated testing platforms and unit tests. 
* Great communication skills, strong work ethic. 
* Ownership of the product from start to finish. 
* Knowledge of code versioning tools such as Git, Mercurial or SVN. 
* Ability to learn new technologies quickly.

Nice to haves: 
* Experience with AWS 
* Expert level understanding of the HTML DOM and underlying event model 
* Exposure to Gulp, Grunt, Bootstrap 
* Prior Open source contributions 
* Experience building responsive designs