Lead Frontend Software Engineer

The Conversation

We’re looking for a curious and experienced front end developer to join our platform team.

At The Conversation our mission is to democratise news, share knowledge and inform decisions.

In a world that’s infected with Spin and Fake news it’s more important than ever for us to deliver on our mission.

As a lead frontend software engineer you’ll not only help develop and shape the way news is delivered and consumed, but you will also play a critical role in developing the tools to empower our editorial workforce to quickly produce and review breaking news in a rigorous manner.

The work you do will have an immediate impact with a reach of over 40M onsite impressions p/month with a further ~40M through our distribution network. With multiple deploys per day you’ll see your work front and centre of the rapidly changing global news landscape.

The Conversation (theconversation.com) is an independent source of news, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public.

The Conversation’s platform team is a remote first team focused on making sure our fundamentals are right across the business, consequently our codebase and process is constantly being improved and optimised so we can react and deliver across the changing landscape.

• Driving front-end technical strategy.
• Build efficient and reusable front-end abstraction and systems.
• Ability to collaborate with designers to rapidly prototype ideas and maintain scalable design systems.
• Drive delivery of projects from ideation to completion while also ensuring overall reliability, performance, security and stability.
• Promote a safe and healthy culture to focus on collaboration and open communication.
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks.
• Identify and address SEO best practices.
• Participate in design and code reviews.

Requirements

• Able to work remotely & autonomously.
• The ability to clearly convey thoughts and ideas; both verbal and written.
• Strong communicator and stakeholder management.
• Extensive experience with delivering front end systems with React.
• Ability to write high-performance, reusable code for UI components, including appropriate testing.
• Has had experience with provisioning SSR tooling for use with a Rails/React codebase.
• Demonstrable product acumen.
• Intimate knowledge of cross browser and cross-device development.
• Passion for performance, debugging and benchmarking.
• Knowledge of SEO best practices, performance with SEO in mind.

• Working with a remote team.
• Has had experience with Hypernova.
• Experience with React Native.
• Experience in setting up build infrastructure and architecture for medium-scale frontend projects.
• Experience leading engineering projects and teams.
• Dealing with donation based ecommerce systems.
• Experience in Publishing, News, Infographics development, Data Visualisation tooling.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary.
• Flexible daily working hours, we prioritise for a healthy work-life balance.
• An engaging and meaningful workplace!
• Annual education budget (The team usually travels and attends a conference) when safe to do so.

This role is open to remote applicants within Australia that do not need visa sponsorship. We will require occasional travel to Melb to participate in team planning, offsite, retreat once it is safe to do so.