Work with us

Position Overview: 

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership to MITTR’s technology team, focused on building, expanding, and maintaining our world-class suite of user-facing applications and supporting systems. To your core, you are passionate about problem solving, quality, healthy team building, and innovation.  
   

You have strong experience creating content-and community-driven products. You can translate complex data and content architecture challenges into fast, accessible, scalable, extensible, secure, testable technical solutions, all while working at the speed of a modern media company. You recognize that software development is not merely an implementation of a product specification. You will use web standards and best-of-breed technology from the open-source community and established vendors.   

Principal Duties and Responsibilities (Essential Functions**):

• Develop the front-end logic and UI for mobile and desktop experiences   
• Lead thoughtful technical evolution of MIT Technology Review’s middleware and backend systems 
• Work with designers and product managers to implement new features and functionality  
• Integrate with, and potentially extend, backend APIs 

• Play a principal role in architecture decisions that set the course for all technology that connects our users to our journalism and to our secondary lines of business 
• Leads MITTR’s most complex technical projects personally and advises and provides guiding expertise on other projects.  
• Communicates and conveys technical reasoning and decision-making to stakeholders, both technical and non-technical.  
• Leads technical solutions and road mapping exercises as Sr. member of the development team. 
• Participates as technical lead in evaluating new tools, code libraries, and other technical solutions needed for the success of MITTR.  

• Spends significant time writing, modifying, reviewing, and/pr debugging code.  
• Readily develops understanding of cross team strengths and weaknesses, and helps organize team to maximize quality of output, while assisting in mentorship of developing staff.  
• Acts as a principal touchpoint to engineering decision-making for both the CTO and Head of Product.  

Education and Experience:

MINIMUM REQUIRED EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: 

• B.S. or M.S degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience  
• Minimum 7 years of experience building large-scale web sites or web applications 

• Expert level fluency with JavaScript/CSS/HTML  
• Experience with Wordpress, with a preference for experience developing decoupled architectures.  
• Advanced experience with HTML5, CSS3, transitions, preprocessors like Sass or Less, Canvas and SVG  
• Background in implementing the UI for large-scale sites or web-based applications across platforms and browsers  
• Extensive understanding of all major browsers and the special considerations required for various quirks  

• Understanding of page performance optimizations, and how to integrate those efforts into everyday development tasks 
• Knowledge of the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, familiarity with WAI-ARIA and assistive technologies like screen readers, and experience with implementing best practices to maximize accessibility. 
• Hands-on experience with popular javascript libraries and client-side frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, etc.) 
• Passion for performance debugging and benchmarking  
• Ability to quickly prototype ideas or concepts  as working interfaces that use existing look and style guidelines  

• Ability to establish and communicate a point-of-view on how the code is structured and organized  
• Adept with using version control systems like Git or SVN as part of the development process  
• Solid understanding of the parts of a modern javascript toolchain, like transpilers and bundlers, and experience configuring such tools. 
• Experience with DevOps practices and ability to establish build, test, and deploy pipelines using tools like Travis CI, CircleCI, or similar 
• Experience working with content management systems or blogging platforms like WordPress or Drupal 

 

** To comply with regulations by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the principal duties in job descriptions must be essential to the job. To identify essential functions, focus on the purpose and the result of the duties rather than the manner in which they are performed. The following definition applies: a job function is essential if removal of that function would fundamentally change the job.