Mar 20, 2022
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 and improving our codebase and infrastructure through both client-side and server-side development;
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:
Developing 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 will be able to quickly grasp our existing Vue.js app and back-end systems and be proficient in spoken and written English so that you can contribute authoritatively and collaborate effectively.
For this role you will need:
Prowess in HTML5, CSS3 and modern JavaScript
Vue (or experience working with a modern front-end framework such as React or Angular and a willingness to pick up Vue quickly) and build tools (e.g. webpack, Babel, etc)
Experience with node.js, Python, Perl or another high-level language such as Go, Java, PHP or Ruby
MySQL/SQL
Familiarity with the Linux command line, bash, and Git
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
An understanding of the patterns and principles behind great software design and OOP, allowing you to write code that's clean, fast and scalable
In addition, skills, or an interest, in one or more of these would be nice to have:
SEO
Database design, and/or query optimisation skills
Apache2, HTTP
Docker and Docker Swarms
Amazon AWS and/or Google Cloud
Layer 2+3 networking, iptables firewall rules, server installation/administration
You’re also someone who:
Is open to new technologies, 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
Is comfortable working 100% remotely
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 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.
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.
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.