Full stack Developer

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We are looking for skilled and enthusiastic developers to join our technology team based from fantastic offices on Lower Thames Street office. Back in 2017, we started a new development team called Emerging Products, which operates entirely lean, innovation-driven, and focuses relentlessly on rapid innovation to discover new business models in the publishing industry.

Our aim is to inform communities by aggregating hyperlocal news and data, and empowering them to make a difference locally by giving them the tools to make their voices heard. We look to support local journalism by providing tools and information to improve local storytelling and we aim to offer local and national business a set of high value products to promote their businesses. As a team, we focus on operating entirely lean, being innovation-driven and rapid innovation. Although the product is relatively new, we are in a high growth phase and looking to grow the team so that we can continue producing new innovative features and to integrate the InYourArea platform into the wider business.

We are Reach because it's what we do.

Every day our newsbrands - national and regional, in print and online - reach millions of people up and down the country. We are the UK's largest news publisher, with influential national newsbrands such as the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sunday People, Daily Record, and more than 100 distinguished regional titles.

Our brands have a long heritage of being trusted sources of news and information, with our editorial conviction and high standards of journalism providing audiences with timely information and opinion across multiple platforms.

Last year we sold 620 million newspapers, with 5.8 million readers of one of our brands each month. Our network of over 70 websites provide 24/7 coverage of news, sport and showbiz stories, with 8.1 billion page views per year.

We average 21.5 million mobile visitors - that's 60% of the entire mobile market. Each month we attract over 32 million unique visitors. That's more than our competitors. You will help us further increase our digital audience into 2019.

Key Responsibilities

You will maintain and extend our existing fully isomorphic front end which is built off of a modern React stack consisting of React 16, Flow or Typescript depending on the service, and Webpack 4.

You will also help build out our highly performant server-side rendering framework based on AWS . You will also be involved in back end development mostly consisting of REST API's and AWS Lambda functions, mostly built in Node.js with Redis and DynamoDB as a datastore.

You will also have the opportunity, if you show an aptitude for it, to get involved in native app development (React Native) and/or machine learning (Python)

You will work closely with the Team Leader, Head of Product, Lead Designer and a few other full stack, and data scientists.

We are a small and cohesive team, and we always optimise for shortest time to market, which often results in tech debt being introduced on purpose, and factored out once a feature has been validated. You have to be comfortable with this style of working. We deploy multiple times a day to production.

You need to be fluent in Javascript, with commercial experience in building applications with either NodeJS, vanilla JS or any Frontend JS frameworks (e.g. Angular, React, Vue). Being fluent in React would be awesome, but if you are experienced with Javascript, we're perfectly capable of helping you achieve this skill. Ideally, we are looking for a Fullstack developer, but a Frontend or Backend developer with aspirations to become Full Stack is also welcome to apply. An understanding and preference for Functional Programming are highly desirable, but we can teach you this otherwise. We use AWS extensively, and we provision our own resources (using Cloudformation), so some knowledge of AWS will help. We expect to mentor you in this aspect though.

In terms of our culture, we are excited by rapid, lean development procedures with very little administrative overhead (think of a mixture between Lean and Programmer Anarchy - we've abolished all time consuming Agile processes, in favour of being agile). We strive to receive real feedback from what we've built in the form of real user stats, as quickly as possible after we've built it, and we relentlessly do whatever we can to drive this time-to-feedback downward. We deploy changes to Production as often as possible. We are comfortable with the fact that our decisions and the result of our work will be proven wrong by stats, and adapt very quickly.

Package Description

In addition to competitive salaries, 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays), bonus structures (if applicable) and a contributory pension scheme, Reach plc has a wealth of flexible benefits on offer. These include holiday purchase scheme, cycle scheme, a technology scheme in conjunction with Curry's PC World, car scheme, health cash plan, employee loans and lots of high street discounts! Our business is fully committed to health and wellbeing in the workplace with an employee assistance programme and trained mental health first aiders across the business.

Reach plc believe diversity brings benefits for our customers, our business and our people. This is why we are committed to being an inclusive employer and encourage applications from all suitable applicants irrespective of background, circumstances, age, disability, gender identity, ethnicity, religion or belief and sexual orientation. We will be reviewing applications as they are received so please don't delay in submitting your application. 

Closing date: 22/08/2019