Senior UI/Front-End Developer at Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF)

About Job

Do you want to use your coding skills to improve the lives of millions of people? Are you brave enough to let millions of UX designers use your code? Are you obsessive about your own professional development and continuous learning-through-doing? Then read on! 

The Interaction Design Foundation is the biggest online design school globally. Founded in 2002, we have over 90,000 graduates and counting. We're market leaders in online design education because the world’s leading experts create our content and because we're specialized in design. What’s more, with over 1.5 million monthly visitors, we’re at the forefront of providing premier design education to such organizations as IBM and SAP, as well as thousands of other companies. Our ever-growing community now needs a first-class front-end developer to help craft the ultimate user experience.

This is where your passion for UX and hard-science coding skills merge: Every time your code is executed, you help improve the life of a human being. And not only that, those members will likely go on to design better products and services to the benefit of all humankind.

Our front-end code is a vital part of our winning formula: Our codebase is our baby and it can never become too perfect. You will, therefore, become an essential part of our long-term success, someone who is making a direct impact on not only the growth and reputation of our foundation but also the whole world of design education and beyond!

This is a paid full-time position which is location independent: You’re free to work from wherever you want in the world. You will have regular video-based contact with your colleagues and get to meet them physically on team trips.

What you will be doing

You will join our team as our Senior UI/Front-End Developer and your main responsibilities will be to:

• Write reusable components using the Laravel Blade template engine, CSS and presentational JavaScript.

• Help improve our Design System at https://design-system.interaction-design.org 

• Maintain our PostCSS code base to keep and improve reusability and DX and deliver less CSS to the end-user.

• Improve CSS architecture and guidelines, make principal technical decisions in the UI area.

• Help us use animations more widely, e.g. with Lottie animations.

• Automate regression testing and front end code quality checks.

• Improve the accessibility and performance of our pages.

• Work with our design team to improve UX on different stages of the design process.

• Work on PWA for our course platform as a part of the front-end team (offline support, better mobile experience, etc.)

• Help yourself, and the whole team, get better and better. For example, by improving our handbook at https://handbook.interaction-design.org. Or use our library of evergreen literature on back-end and front-end subjects to broaden your horizon.

You and our future-proof stack

Forget IE and clunky workarounds for compatibility with other dinosaur browsers: We spend our time only on modern Web APIs since we only support evergreen browsers.

We’re constantly refactoring our front-end code with the goal of reaching front-end heaven. We seek a balance between sticking with what works and fearlessly exploring the new:

• Laravel Blade template engine (yup, we build our HTML on the server-side).

• PostCSS to maximize the power of modern CSS.

• Webpack for perfect control over front-end assets.

• Latest JS with support for ES2020 features. To accomplish this we use the latest Babel releases.

• BEM/ITCSS in combination with Tailwind CSS based utility classes.

• A custom-made design system to achieve consistency and ease of use.

We ❤ CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) so we usually deploy a few releases per day: Zero downtime. Just a few buttons to push. No sweaty palms

We care deeply about Developer Experience (DX) of our codebase and tools. DX and DevOps is our middle name: git, GitHub, HTTP2, CDN, AWS, Enterprise SSDs on our high-spec servers and much more.

About you

• You have at least 5 years of experience working as a Front-End Developer.

• You prefer native web APIs and functionality over alluring new frameworks - and you know how and when to use them.

• You regularly use WHATWG and W3C and you are intimately familiar with the latest web standards.

• You can create your own intelligent, reusable CSS layout system.

• You test across devices and browsers, and optimize for performance.

• You write testable code.

• You love to learn through doing. You’re always ready to put in some hard work to expand your skills.

• You speak and write acceptable English – not perfect English, just acceptable – since you will be working with people from Canada, England, Denmark, the US, Belarus and Brazil among others.

• You are a team player and you don't bring your ego to work. 

• You are self-motivated and self-disciplined and thus work well in a flat hierarchy with lots of freedom.

• You love to have creative freedom, make independent judgments and live up to the responsibility that comes with that freedom.

• You love to create tangible results—every hour and every day.