Frontend Engineer

We’re Farewill - we build simple, beautiful products to change the way the world deals with death.

We’ve grown to lead our industry, becoming the biggest (and favourite) will-writer in the UK. What’s more, we’ve raised over £250M in charity legacy donations, and been recognised as the national will writing firm of the year at the wills and probate industry awards.

In the last year we’ve launched and scaled two new products helping families with probate and more recently cremation, with outstanding customer reviews.

We're a diverse, close-knit team of 90 at the forefront of legal technology, playing a crucial role in modernising important legal services, in order to provide best in class customer experiences at the times our customers need it most.

We have 15 Engineers at Farewill currently, and we’re looking to grow our Engineering team as we build out more cross-functional product teams.

This is an amazing opportunity to build best-in-class products whilst growing your skills and experience as part of a diverse, high-performing and supportive environment.

Our tech

Our applications are written in ES6 JavaScript and TypeScript, and our stack includes React, Node, PostgreSQL, MongoDB. You don't need experience with all of the technologies we use – we're keen to hear from people from different backgrounds!

On the frontend we're using React with styled-components and our internal component library. Our website is powered by Gatsby, and throughout our applications we use React hooks and Redux to manage state.

Our codebases use ESLint, Prettier, Mocha and Jest to automate testing. We push to GitHub, test on CircleCI and deploy (continuously) to Heroku.

Who you are:

You’re a Frontend Engineer who wants to build high-quality user-facing applications. You have several years of professional experience shipping code you're proud of as part of a product development team, and you're very confident with CSS and React or a similar framework. You have a deep knowledge of best practice in developing for the web, covering accessibility, performance, semantic markup and state management.

You’re motivated by building great products that solve real problems, whether it’s making our customers’ lives better in difficult situations, enabling our own team through great tooling or improving website conversion metrics. You care about the quality of the work you produce, aiming to make it stable, maintainable and easy to work with for the rest of the Farewill team.

You’re keen to work collaboratively and are able to communicate potentially complicated and technical concepts in ways that make it easy for other disciplines to understand. In the areas you don’t have much prior experience, you’re excited by the prospect of getting stuck in and learning something new.

As an engineer in our team, over the next 12 months, you’ll:

• Join one of our multidisciplinary agile teams to build user experiences for growth + marketing, and develop the user-facing parts of our digital products.
• Pitch in with discovery, ideation and research alongside designers, engineers and user researchers in order to identify, prioritise, solve problems iteratively.
• Ensure that our standards for frontend engineering are high.
• Gain an understanding of our business, our customers, and our domain, allowing you to use your judgement to make autonomous decisions.
• Play an active role in our code review process, reviewing code from across the team as well as making it easy for others to review the code you write
• Work with existing features, keeping them in line with best practices and new technologies.
• Share your knowledge/experience/interests with the team – be it through pairing, a company passion talk or external speaking opportunity.
• Form part of our Engineering Guild to identify and prioritise tech work, share knowledge and shape how we use technology at Farewill.

Requirements

• Strong professional experience developing frontend applications for the web - the ideal candidate likely has at least a few years of experience in a similar role. This role won't be such a great fit for you if you've started your engineering career more recently than that, or if you've recently graduated from a bootcamp
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Empathy and integrity, both towards users and fellow team members
• Knowledge of testing (both automated and manual)
• Experience with version control (ideally Git & GitHub)

If this sounds like what you’d love to be doing, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you love the role but don’t know if you’re a 100% match then still get in touch, we value attitude and propensity to learn above lists of roles in a CV.

Benefits

What we offer in return:

• Competitive salary and generous stock options
• 28 days of annual leave plus the usual public holidays
• £1000 and 3 days a year to spend on your personal development
• Work from home on Wednesdays, flexible start and end to your day
• Off-site days and team lunches
• Santander cycles membership
• The chance to make a meaningful contribution to people's lives and deaths