Senior Software Engineer

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 6th largest digital organisation.

There are 47m online readers in the UK, 30.8m of who get local news from the Live network - 65% of all adults. Our network of over 70 websites provides 24/7 coverage of news, sport and showbiz stories, with 8.1 billion page views per year.

About the role:

We are a team who leverage knowledge graphs and semantic web technologies to help journalists and editors to best describe the articles we (Reach) write, which ultimately means readers get the most relevant and interesting content possible.

We are looking for a Mid or Senior Software Engineer with experience of building APIs, using those APIs to build webpages and SPAs; doing this in a well-tested, documented and repeatable way. We use a variety of technologies, depending on the needs of our solutions. Coding currently includes React, Node and low-code solutions, and we harness many AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, Neptune, Aurora, Kinesis and SQS - all through IaC.

Ideally you will bring experience of different technologies and approaches which will help us continually improve how we deliver solutions to the business.

This is a multi-disciplined team including ontologists, business analysts, engineers, a product manager and project manager… so there is plenty of cross-fertilisation of ideas and creativity. As a team we produce solutions that journalists and editors use, so there is no shortage of customer feedback, so we know what we do makes a difference!

Key Responsibilities:

You will be an active part of an empowered team which means we have the ability to decide what we do and how we do it, being responsible for outcomes. We all have a significant voice as we make these decisions and review.

You will need to care about testing and the quality of code, putting maintainability over 'cleverness'. You need to care that there is 'appropriate' documentation.

You will be writing both application code and code to provision the infrastructure it runs on, and we are responsible for keeping it running so observability is really important.

You will work closely with the tech lead making sure all we build meets our standards and that we're using the most appropriate tech and practices.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Skilled in software development using JavaScript with a strong understanding of HTML as CSS, plus exposure to React
  Experience with other languages such as Python, Scala or Go is helpful, but definitely not essential
• Experienced with testing frameworks, such as Jest or similar, as part of local development and within a CI/CD context
• Experienced in using AWS via the web console and programmatically (infrastructure-as-code) e.g. CDK, CloudFormation, EC2, ASG, Lambda, Kinesis, Docker
• We are looking for someone with previous experience working in an agile environment, and you need to be comfortable working remotely regularly as the team is spread out throughout the UK and Ireland
• We are looking for someone able to leverage their experience working with software development and big data to design, build and deploy solutions and ensure we plan work effectively and that appropriate documentation, schemas, tests and testing strategies are in place to support the team and the products we develop and maintain

• 1st stage: 30mins google hangout
• 2nd stage: 1hr30mins: Paired programming exercise on google hangout for 1hr and 30mins soft interview team-fit/personality/drive