Senior Software Engineer / Dev Team Lead - Remote - NewsNow : Job Details

About the role

We are looking for a fully-remote Senior Software Engineer/Dev Team Lead to take overall day-to-day operational responsibility for uptime of the NewsNow platform and for leading our small dev team in efficiently shipping product improvements that deliver business impact both commercially and in respect of our mission to provide the public with world-leading news aggregation services.

You and your skills

The right candidate will:

• Be highly numerate and analytical, backed by a mathematics, computer science, stats or physics degree (or equivalent experience)
• Have excellent high-level language coding skills in any of e.g. Perl, Python, C/C++, Go, Rust, NodeJS, Java and a language-agnostic attitude
• Have experience of Perl, Python 3 and NodeJS and a willingness to work with these or learn them fast
• Have strong scripting skills (Bash, Perl, Python)
• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to engage authoritatively in technical discussions around the specifications of projects
• Be confident with Linux server/system administration (e.g. package installation/configuration, upgrades to distribution and kernels, filesystems and volume management)
• Have experience running containerised workloads using Docker or K8s
• Be expert-level at Root Cause Analysis
• Bring a strong appetite for learning new skills and technologies. Expert at researching and becoming adept in new or unfamiliar technologies.
• Have two years experience of training and running teams to deliver on time and on budget
• Be willing to drive the team from the front and be accountable for its performance

The right candidate will also have understanding and experience of at least 3 of the following, and be capable of learning the rest as needed:

• Distributed or large-scale systems
• MySQL/SQL database design, query optimisation and admin
• Web development in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue/React
• Apache web server software and related modules
• Cloud platforms and concepts (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
• Setup, testing and administration of CI/CD pipelines
• Networking and firewalling
• Natural language processing

Responsibilities

Responsibilities for this role will include the following:

Leading, driving and motivating the development team

• Allocating work to individual developers, keeping a focus on business priorities and how they further the company’s mission
• Supporting team members in their work and learning
• Driving and reporting on team performance and execution
• Motivating the team to keep momentum high and the focus on delivery

Design, build and implementation

• Developing and maintaining a detailed understanding of, and striving to become an authority on, all NewsNow’s systems and languages
• Scoping, designing and developing across frontend and especially backend subsystems
• Upholding standards (e.g. in maintainability, security, scalability, efficiency)
• Squashing all the bugs other developers cannot

Contributing towards monitoring, maintenance and administration of our production stack

• Dell R630/R640 servers running Debian Linux and containerised workloads (Docker Swarm)
• Replicated databases (MySQL) and volume management using LVM and ZFS
• Firewall (iptables/nftables) and dynamic routing protocols (BGP, OSPF)
• Participation in on-call rotation, and providing third line support with overall responsibility for resolving production outages.

On-the-job training will be provided on the specific application of these technologies in our stack.

About NewsNow

NewsNow 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.

Our Culture

• Open: we share and collaborate within and across departments
• Rigorous: We like to be clear about what we're doing, and why. Experimentation and peer-review are in our DNA
• One team, one vision: no office politics
• An appreciative environment: expect to hear 'thanks' a lot
• Room to grow: development of skills and responsibilities is encouraged and rewarded
• Virtual: we are today a fully-remote company with occasional in-person get-togethers
• Family-friendly and flexible: we offer flexible working, and understand sometimes personal needs come first