Frontend Web Developer

We need a frontend developer to join our team and help us build well thought-out, highly usable web sites and web applications for our clients. You're looking for a satisfying work environment, good colleagues, and a challenging job that doesn't ask you to spend every waking minute working or on call. If we're both lucky, we'll be a perfect fit for each other.

You: A frontend developer with a solid grasp of HTML, CSS (+SCSS), and JavaScript

To be a good fit for this position, you'll need to be well versed in modern HTML and CSS. You'll work closely with our other frontend developers to turn design comps into application views and CMS templates. On a typical project, your work will begin during the design phase, during which you'll meet with internal or external UX and visual designers to review and discuss their designs as they come together. You'll bring the perspective of someone who has experience implementing designs in frontend technologies to those discussions, and provide feedback to the designers based on that experience. When design is finalized, you will work with our other frontend developers and our internal project lead to architect the frontend development. On some projects, your role will be to provide guidance to our other frontend developers. On other projects, you will be the one building out the front-end.

You should have a strong grasp of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You should be able to take a design comp and turn it into well-tested, responsive markup that is flexible enough to work as expected when incorporated into dynamic application views. While experience with modern JavaScript frameworks like React will be helpful, what's more important is that you have a solid foundation in writing modern JavaScript. Ideally, you've at least explored tools like Babel and Webpack, and feel comfortable writing javascript that interacts with the DOM without relying on jQuery.

Cast Iron Coding works with smart, purpose driven clients to reliably deliver beautiful, ambitious software that their users love.

Cast Iron Coding is a web development studio. We build things—CMS driven websites, small brochure sites, large open-source applications, internal business web applications, backend APIs—for our clients. While we regularly use a variety of frontend and backend languages and technologies, all of our projects are built on the core web technologies of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Consequently, most, but not all, of our projects run in a browser.

Unlike many firms that turn jobs around quickly and move on to the next project, we're in it for the long haul with all our clients, so we care a great deal about the craft that goes into what we build. We've been building web sites, web apps, and mobile apps since about 2004, for a wide variety of clients.

If you took a snapshot of what we're working on right now, you'd see a company willing to take on a variety of different kinds of projects, including:

• We're building an open source, academic publishing platform called Manifold under a Mellon Foundation grant.
• We just finished building a web application that helps Oregonians facing food insecurity find food assistance sites.
• We're building new sites for an art gallery in New York City and for a large animal rescue operation in CA.
• We're building a dashboard for a fortune 500 company that helps employees track the publication and performance of thousands of online resources
• We're doing a new round of development on a web app that encourages people to change their behavior so that it's more eco-friendly and sustainable.
• We're getting started on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that digitizes and visualizes thousands of hand-written responses provided by soldiers returning from WWII.

One of the true pleasures of working at Cast Iron Coding is that we work on projects that interest us across a wide variety of sectors. We like working with small businesses, academics, nonprofits, and organizations we admire. But we also like sinking our teeth into a thorny, difficult enterprise project where revenue is at stake. We love a big challenge, and problems that make us think hard about what we're building. We've been at this long enough now—about 15 years—and we've resisted growing fast or sacrificing quality. Our clients speak highly of us and, perhaps a better metric, our past employees who've moved on to greener pastures still come back to hang out and grab a beer with the team.

Equal Opportunity

Let's face it. The field we work in—tech generally, programming specifically—has a diversity problem. Like many in the industry, we'd like to see this change. Cast Iron Coding is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to inclusion and equity. As such, we are particularly interested in receiving applications from developers who self identify as those who have been historically underrepresented in our field.

We're hoping to cast a wide net for this position, so take these requirements as a set of guidelines, rather than hard and fast rules. The more these bullets describe you, the stronger your application will likely be.

• You should probably have some college or higher education background. It's not essential, but we want to see that you're able to engage in critical thinking and analytical reasoning. These skills are crucial, in our experience, to good software architecture. Your background absolutely does not need to be in computer science. The owner of Cast Iron taught English literature for a decade, and we value a background in the humanities, as long as it's matched by some technical experience.
• You need to have demonstrable experience writing responsive HTML and CSS. The more you've written, the better. We're looking for someone who understands media queries, has used flexbox and/or grid, and is comfortable with CSS transitions. Ideally, you understand why it matters whether the site has to support IE11, and how the decision around browser support affects what CSS techniques are available to you.
• You are well-versed in SCSS. We use Sass on all our projects, and we couldn't live without it.
• You have a pretty strong grasp of JavaScript, and have some experience (professional, ideally) writing modern javascript. Ideally, you've worked with at least one JavaScript framework. If that JavaScript framework is React, which is what we mostly use these days, even better. You're familiar with web APIs and what you don't know, you can quickly find in MDN's docs. While we don't necessarily need you to be able to create a complex frontend application, we do want you to be able to create a complex UI component and control its behavior with JavaScript.
• You are comfortable communicating with clients and working on a team. Our clients are our life-blood, and we're not big on project managers, which means that developers tend to do a lot of face-to-face work with clients. We want people who are strong communicators, personable, and who can argue (kindly, tactfully) for the right development approach against clients who may not be as technically savvy as they are.
• You need to be able to show or tell us about something you built that you're proud of. It could be something you worked on at a previous job, or it could be a side project that you're excited about.
• You've had some experience working on professional software projects, and you're no stranger to working on a team: tracking features and bugs; adhering to shared code style and conventions; using Git for branching, merging, and rebasing; writing code that is easy to understand; and documenting your work as needed.
• Cast Iron is currently working 100% remotely due to COVID-19 and expect that we'll be remote until at least 2021. While we're open to remote applicants, we're also looking forward to the day when we can meet face-to-face some of the time, so we'd prefer someone in the greater Portland area.

• You get to work with a team of programmers who are technically competent and who, additionally, bring a strong background in the humanities to their work.
• Our team members trust and support each other. We value mentorship and collaboration, and we support learning and experimentation. Before COVID, we'd play board games together every couple of weeks. These days, we have a great time playing D&D online over Zoom.
• You will be given a reasonable starting salary, depending on your experience. This salary will almost certainly be less than what a startup flush with venture capital or a much larger company might offer. In return for making a little bit less money, we won't make you go to (very many) pointless meetings, and we won't expect you to give up your life outside of work to be successful at work. You'll work regular 9-5 hours, and most of your time at work will be spent feeling productive. Moreover, if you stay at CIC for a while and prosper as a developer, your salary will increase each year. In addition to your salary, you will likely receive a substantial winter bonus each year.
• You will receive top-notch health insurance, including dental and nontraditional medicine. CIC will pay 50% of your health insurance premium on our group plan, as well as 50% of the insurance cost for your partner and, if you have them, your children.
• You will have the option of enrolling in our 401k plan.
• You'll be offered ample vacation and sick leave. Life-work balance matters, and we try hard to help employees stay healthy and happy.
• You can work from home, work from the office, or a mix of the two. We recently moved out of Washington High School and are now sharing a space with Brink Communications in SE Portland until Q3, 2021. Later next year we will build out a new space that better supports the hybrid work-from-home / in-person model that we envision going forward.