Lead Software Engineer (Javascript / Node)
News UK : Wireless, Technology
Remote
We are: News UK is a company full of talented, dedicated and creative people. We are an ambitious and ever-growing organisation with a passion for storytelling, capturing moments, meaning and magic to make sense of the world. Our newspapers reach more than 30 million people each week and include The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. News UK is also home to Wireless, a leading UK and Irish media company boasting independent local and national radio stations.
Your team: Wireless is part of a thriving engineering community in Technology who design, develop and operate all of News UK's customer facing products and platforms. Wireless brands include talkSPORT, talkRADIO, Virgin Radio UK and Times Radio. We are ‘ushering in a new age of radio, audio and video products, focusing on new technologies and platforms that will drive our strategic goals across the ecosystem, starting with our new Web Platform, powering the websites of Virgin Radio and the soon-to-be-launched talkTV.
Your role: Lead Engineer. We are looking for a talented and passionate Principal Engineer to seed and build out our Web Platform team across UK and Sofia, Bulgaria.
Day to day you will: As a LeadEngineer you will work alongside our engineers, product owners and stakeholders based in London and Sofia to lead and steer the technical conversations and ensure that what we build is best in class and fit for purpose. Working with the Head of Engineering, you’ll be responsible for the technical strategy and tactical implementation, as well as hiring, growing and managing your team.
What we’re looking for from you: You’re a true engineer with a passion for well crafted and tested code, considering everything from architecture and security to performance. You understand agile methodologies and enjoy collaboration. You lead by example, encouraging your peers to constantly improve. You have a continuous improvement mindset and are proactive in driving positive change, encouraging those around you to do the same.
You love engineering and constantly want to learn more. You do thorough code reviews to be sure what we produce is of a very high standard. You understand the value of testing and are a practitioner of TDD/BDD. You are an expert in JavaScript/TypeScript and perhaps some other languages too.
As a Lead Engineer you’ll be involved with leading technical direction as well as day to day coding standards and best practices. You’ll be a mentor and manager to your peers and team members, a source of technical expertise, and will participate in strategic conversations with the rest of engineering and the business. You’ll feel comfortable presenting to internal teams as well as external Meetups and the like, representing the engineering work at News UK.
You’ll find these skills useful in this role:
‘ 5 years or more commercial experience with programming in Javascript, TypeScript and other modern programming languages.
‘ Experience with Node JS and Express, NextJS and other modern frameworks and technologies.
‘ Demonstrable experience designing, building, maintaining & integrating with REST or GraphQL APIs.
‘ Knowledge of code analysis and type checking tools for Javascript (e.g. ESLint, Prettier, Istanbul)
‘ Knowledge of build and packaging tools (e.g. Babel, Grunt, Gulp, NPM, Yarn)
‘ Quality-led approach to development (documentation, monitoring & alerting, unit/component/contract/end-to-end testing).
‘ Experience with CI/CD tools and practices and a DevOps mindset.
‘ Experience with performance optimisation, caching and security on highly available application deployments.
‘ Hands-on with Kubernetes and similar cloud-native tools within AWS or similar ecosystems.
‘ Excellent communication skills contextually tailored to various levels of the organisation including external parties.
Life at News UK
At News UK some of us work flexibly, in many different ways. We encourage you to talk to us about the flexibility you need. We can’t promise to offer exactly what you want, but we do promise not to judge you for asking.
We champion diversity and inclusion, we strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity Board, D&I strategy & training, creating more diverse content and our intern and apprenticeship programmes. We also have 8 employee-led networks; Cultural Diversity, News is Out, GenZ, Sustainability Champions, News for Parents, Women in Tech, News UK Christian Fellowship and we are awaiting the launch of our Women’s Steering Group.
We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK supporting the Health and Wellbeing of our staff. We offer private medical insurance covering pre-existing conditions, discounted gym memberships, ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual HIIT, yoga and run club classes, and a ‘Bikes for Work’ scheme, as well as offering opportunities for physio/massage, counselling and legal support.
In addition we also offer:
- A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;
- 25 days holiday and up to 4 volunteering days per year;
- Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks;
- Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.
We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when interviewing, so feel free to let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.
