Senior Front End Software Engineer
Culture Trip
Our mission is to inspire people to go beyond their cultural boundaries and experience what makes a place, its people and culture, special, unique and meaningful. Together with our users, we take a stand for an open, tolerant and cosmopolitan world. We deeply care about this, and aspire to be creative, sustainable and inclusive in everything we do.
We help our culturally curious audience explore and experience their world, wherever they are, wherever they go, with our award-winning stories and recommendations, and our curated collection of thousands of memorable local and international experiences and places to stay that can now be directly planned and booked via our site and our app.
While travel might be restricted right now, we know that the universal need to experience life never is. That’s why our ‘Stay Safe, Stay Curious’ campaign invites you to explore and experience your own cities and countries, and get outdoors where possible. We have also launched virtual experiences such as online cooking classes with local chefs, museum tours guided by experts and walking tours through much loved cities that you can enjoy from the comfort of your home.
Culture Trip has shown record-breaking growth: monthly unique visitors have gone to 15-20 million, app downloads have leapt to more than 2.7 million, social followers have increased to 8 million (in 2019, we were the fastest growing travel and media brand on social media) and our videos have been viewed more than 2.5 billion times since 2016.
Since 2019 alone, we have won more than 30 awards including 16 Telly awards, 10 Muse Creative awards, 2 Webby awards, 2 Lovie awards, the Travel Media’s Consumer Publication Of The Year Award, and our app was named App of the Day by Apple in the US and the UK.
Culture Trip was founded in 2011 and Dr Kris Naudts spent four years evolving the concept of Culture Trip alongside a small team. Dr Naudts secured seed funding of $2 million in 2015, Series A funding in 2016 when PPF Group invested $20 million and a further funding injection of $80 million in 2018.
As a Senior Front End Software Engineer you will work as part of a cross functional team of designers, product managers and engineers from different teams. We are building teams to deliver everything from tools to help us deliver creativity at scale, to main site features to allow our users to learn about the world and plan their next trip.
Our Front End is built and delivered as a React site against a Node.js BFF. We are looking for a great team member who is familiar with these technologies but we are willing to retrain good engineers on our tech stack. We prefer creative engineers who are keen to learn over specific skills. You will be expected to take an active part in leading many of these decisions, championing your technology choices and promoting them to the rest of the team - but also making less senior team members are heard and represented.As a Senior Frontend Software Engineer you will be able to shape the processes and culture of the growing team. You will also be responsible for coaching and mentoring other engineers.
You should be a self-starter with an entrepreneurial spirit. Above all, you should be creative, passionate and dedicated to building a solid product supported by a great engineering culture.
The Role
- Being part of our web team and taking part in the development of our main site, as well as other web products the company ships, in terms of the frontend and user experience aspects.
- Integrate with the back-end systems and APIs.
- Ensuring our code is of the highest quality by practicing and evangelising engineering best practices (code reviews, pairing, etc)
- Help define and build our engineering process, culture and team structure
- Work closely with Product Management, UX & Design and other Engineers to build new tools enabling creativity at scale
- Influence outside your immediate team, work with peers on other sites to build joint solutions
The Requirements:
- Great interpersonal skills
- Great team player
- Self driven and willing to learn new things
- 4+ years of experience in Front-End Web Development
- 2+ years of experience in building Web Applications with React
- Deep understanding of the Javascript language and how browsers work
- Extensive experience in web front-end development and UX High proficiency in the basic web technologies – HTML / CSS / Javascript
- Experience with react.js in a production environment of high-availability and large scale
- Unit and end-to-end testing experience
- Proficiency in English (written and verbal)
- Excellent communication skills, ability to effectively articulate technical challenges
- Knowledge of working in an Agile environment (Lean, Scrum, Kanban)
- Proven experience and deep knowledge in tackling web performance issues - a plus
- Experience with MobX framework - a plus
- Experience with Next.js framework - a plusAcad
- Experience with AWS - EKS, CloudFront, Lambda, S3, etc. - a plus
- Experience of working in a microservices architecture - a plus
- Academic degree from a known institution - a plus
Culture Trip is committed to equality of opportunity for all. We strongly believe that diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities, experience, circumstances, abilities and perspectives leads to a better workplace for our employees and a better product for our users.