UX Designer

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. There are long-established operations in major Indian cities such as Mumbai and Chennai across many business areas.

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 Brand Engineering

Our mission is to build compelling and inspiring experiences across our portfolio of global brands such as Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Glamour which currently reaches over 500 million monthly users. Our goals are extremely ambitious; we are rolling out our brands into new countries and territories and pushing to serve more consumers across web, native (iOS / Android), video and social platforms.

We want you to join us as we embark on further global expansion of our brands, creation of new features to deliver our engaging content to consumers worldwide, and diversifying our revenue models. We believe in fostering a culture of experimentation and innovation, often running hundreds of a/b experiments in production every day! 

You will be working alongside international colleagues across US, London, and India. Cross-functional collaboration is at the heart of what we do and you will be comfortable working in close partnership with Product, Design, UX, and Data. The Brand Engineering group works in close partnership with the Platform Engineering group to implement cross-cutting solutions that can be leveraged by the Brands to deliver robust end-to-end experiences for our consumers.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior JavaScript engineer to join our team at our Chennai/Bengaluru office.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 – you should carry on reading!

Our tech

• Languages and Frameworks: Javascript, Node.JS, React (and React eco-system)

• APIs: GraphQL

• Data: Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch

• Deployment: Docker, AWS, Kubernetes

• Source Control: Git, GitHub

How we work

• Infrastructure as Code everywhere

• Pairing. We like knowledge sharing and upskilling

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

• (Oncall - teams are responsible for their own apps)

Role and responsibilities

• Working on our collection of Node apps; we use a mix of Express, Hapi, and Fastify

• Working on our front-end apps; we use a mix of React and Next.js but as long as you have experience in at least one framework we don’t really mind

• Shipping features and services to anywhere between thousands to millions of customers per day.

• 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, solutionizing 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, UX engineers, and product

• Looking at logs and monitoring metrics and responding to alerts; 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 with 7-9 years of experience. 

• Expert knowledge of JavaScript and Node.js, good understanding of ES9 and React.js and JavaScript testing frameworks (such as Jest, Mocha etc.)

• Good understanding of Cloud Native architecture, containerisation, Docker, AWS, CI/CD, and DevOps culture. Kubernetes foundational knowledge would be a great bonus, as we use it extensively.

• 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 (we use Kubernetes extensively, but we have a dedicated platform team on hand to help!)

• 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

• You will be working with a global team and need to be accommodative of different time-zones as required

About you - Desirable skills

• Experience of working with international teams across multiple time-zones

• Mentoring and/or management experience

• Knowing about continuous integration, testing strategies, design systems, software architecture, data and analytics, user experience, accessibility, internationalisation, 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

• Commercial experience using Kubernetes, React and GraphQL

• Understanding the organizational vision and mission and implementing the same through content marketing strategies.
• Ensuring that the content marketing team primarily facilitates brand and purpose to our end target groups with an aim to create better awareness about the product with clients and better brand strategy execution.
• Developing best practices and guidelines for the content team for various channels like social media, internal & external blogs, websites, newsletters, whitepapers, presentations, etc.
• Checking if the contents are aligned to the organizational mission and brand strategy & SEO needs.
• Training direct reports & peers by developing understanding of clients, product, use cases & industry solutions for story ideas.
• Keep aligned with SEO benefits.
• Monitoring & analyzing performance & quality of various contents across platforms and constantly working to improvise on outcomes.
• Working with other departments to generate product / mission use case / benefit stories and executing in distribution strategies.
• Pushing other department peers to generate insights, benchmarks, and use cases that can be shared from various channels

• Graduate and over with excellent oral and written communication skills. MBA in marketing a plus.
• 7+ years experience in content marketing. 2+ years of experience managing content teams.
• Strong networking and interpersonal skills and should be able to establish quality social media communication.
• Strong analytical skills and hands-on with spreadsheets, presentation & document writing.
• Strong understanding of SAAS and other internet-based software products.

• Reporting: Developing on-demand reports
• Presenting reports to senior management; identifying and highlighting key take-aways and improvement areas
• Ad hoc problem solving: Tackling open-ended data-driven problems, as needed.
• Defining ideal target for a given marketing campaign, finding the root cause for low conversion rate in a particular segment
• Creating high-quality presentations for both internal and external stakeholders

• Must have skills: SQL (preferably PSQL), MS Excel (Advanced level, VBA is a +), MS Powerpoint, Problem Solving
• Experience in creating reports, making presentations, white-space thinking