StencilaStencila

Software Engineer (Frontend)

Posted 16.12.2018
Take The InterviewOriginal Job Post

Join a team developing the next generation of tools for data-driven scientific discovery. Stencila aims to lower the barriers to reproducible research and enable collaboration between researchers with different levels of technical expertise. We’re looking for a full-time software engineer to lead development of novel user interfaces for data exploration, visualization and analysis.


About you:


  • You are passionate about understanding how our users think, what their problems are, and building engaging user experiences that solve those problems.
  • You are an engineer with a sense of aesthetics: you have strong technical skills and can build a beautiful interface.
  • You are keen to join in-person user workshops, value user feedback, and act upon it.
  • Are committed to open-source and know from experience what it takes to grow a community around open-source software.
  • Have a strong bias towards getting it done; you choose completion over perfection. You get a buzz out of getting things shipped.
  • Take initiative, ownership and responsibility; you don’t need to wait for permission, don’t mind admitting you were wrong, and fix things when you are.
  • Want to work as part of a diverse team with complementary skills; you give support and take advice.
  • Comfortable working across time zones as part of a small, remote, geographically distributed team. You review asynchronous feedback, and get to work independently.
  • You are comfortable regularly communicating on wins, progress, and roadblocks.


Your Skills & Experience:


  • Experienced at building, testing, and deploying user interfaces in Javascript.
  • Familiar with frontend frameworks like React, Vue and Polymer and state management approaches such as Redux, Mobx, and GraphQL.
  • At home with modern front-end languages e.g. ES2016, Typescript, and build tools e.g. Webpack, Rollup, NPM
  • Experienced in test driven development and testing frameworks e.g. Jest, Puppeteer.
  • Experienced at building from mockups using modern CSS approaches and frameworks e.g Bulma, Tailwind, Semantic UI
  • It’s a nice-to-have if you have a research or science background working with data.
  • Proficient in the English language, both written and verbal


About us:


  • Stencila is building a toolbox of modular, interoperable software components for researchers ranging from Stencila Dockter (a command line tool that makes it easier to create Docker images) to Stencila Hub (a web app that integrates our tools with third-party services like Github and Dropbox) – and plenty of others in between!
  • We’re passionate about making data-driven discovery more accessible to more people and closing the gaps in collaboration between coders and non-coders.
  • We’re obsessed with building tools that make simple thing easy and complex things possible.
  • With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation we are building a core team to take Stencila from a prototype to production.
  • We are a small diverse, 100% remote, 100% open-source team linked to a broad open source and open science community.
  • Stencila is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital or family status, veteran status, or disability. We work hard to accommodate the needs of our team members and community.


Examples of things you’ll do:


  • Be part of the team designing and implementing an open, extensible architecture for user interfaces for data-driven discovery.
  • Work with our product designer to design, build, test, and deploy user interfaces for data analysis and visualization.
  • Be involved in user testing to understand usability problems that users are having. Then fix those problems.
  • Engage with the open-source developer community to encourage contributions. Improve documentation, merge pull requests, respond to issues.


What’s unique about this job?


  • Be part of a unique team working with scientists and other researchers to make data-driven research more open, effective, and reproducible.
  • Opportunities to connect with a global community of people working on open source software for science and scholarship, including Code for Science & Society, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, eLife, Substance, and more!


Take The Interview
Posted 16.12.2018