Senior Fullstack Engineer

Company Description

Job Introduction

We are looking for experienced software engineers to join our Mantis product development team. This team is responsible for the design and development of our award-winning Mantis suite of contextual publishing and AdTech  tools.

Who We Are

We’re part of Reach plc, the UK’s and Ireland’s largest commercial news publisher. Every month, 48 million people come to us, via print and online, for news, entertainment and sport content they can trust.

Mantis is a suite of products developed within our Reach Solutions group which are used extensively across our own digital publications, and are also provided as B2B services used by other publishers and integrated with the wider commercial AdTech ecosystems.

At its core Mantis is a contextual analysis tool which uses ML/AI to provide an in-depth understanding of content created by journalists and others. Around this we have built a suite of products which are used for brand safety and contextual targeting; to provide readers with content recommendations, content search and personalisation; for content aggregation, content feeds and personalised newsletters. Yet more exciting products are in development and planned for the future.

What will you do?

You will be working in our Mantis product development team enhancing and improving our current systems and building the next generation of Mantis services and products.

You will be involved from initial design, through POC to full build, delivery and service management, working with internal stakeholders and external customer teams.

You will work closely with the Tech Leads and Product Owners ensuring that everything we build meets our high standards, is delivered to agreed timescales and that we’re using the most appropriate technologies and development practices.

You will be designing solutions and writing application code (backend services, APIs and frontend components) and DevOps code to provision and manage the infrastructure it runs on. We use multiple cloud platforms to host our applications (including AWS and IBM Cloud), using the cloud services and, increasingly, serverless infrastructure.

As an experienced Senior Engineer you will also advise and help other less experienced team members and will review and approve code changes.

You will be flexible and keen to improve and expand your skills, learning about new programming languages, frameworks and platforms where necessary. One day you might be building a frontend UI for a dashboard or client component, the next you might be creating a new scalable SAAS API, creating a backend application service or researching how to create a new machine learning model for text, image or video analysis.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for experienced software engineers to join our Mantis team.

Ideally, you’ll have plenty of experience building scalable B2B and B2C products and services on cloud platforms and integrating these with customer’s systems. You will be happy to work on your own initiative, while also playing an important role in ensuring the cohesion and success of the wider team.

We are looking for people who care deeply about the code they write, are enthusiastic about clean code principles and development best practices. You should also be able to bridge the gap between the technical and business stakeholders, understanding the commercial drivers and KPIs our products must meet.

Some of the technologies we currently use are listed below and we’d hope you have experience of many of them, but above all else we are looking for developers who can demonstrate a solid well-considered approach to software engineering and testing, and take pride in the work they do.

We Use:

• AWS and IBM Cloud for application services, Google Cloud for some data services.
• Typescript and Javascript on the frontend and Node.js for backend services, plus other languages where appropriate (e.g Java for some of our CMS integrations, Python for data processing)
• React, Next.js, Vue.js, micro-frontends via Webpack module federation
• Relational databases (e.g PostgreSQL, mySql)
• Elastic Search
• MongoDB
• Apache Kafka & AWS Kinesis/DynamoDB event streams
• Serverless Lambda/Cloud Functions
• ECS/Fargate compute services
• S3/Cloud Object Storage
• IBM Watson Natural Language/Machine Learning services. 
• Docker containers
• CDN services (Akamai, Cloudfront)
• Drone CI
• AWS CDK and CloudFormation
• Observability tools (log and service monitoring)
• Unit and integration testing (Karma, Jest, Cypress) 

How we'll look after you

We take good care of our people - and that means more than just a pay packet. Whatever your role, you'll get a range of benefits, including:

• 25 days' holiday (plus bank holidays), as well as an extra day after you've been with us for three, five and 10 years. We also have a scheme to help you buy extra holiday if you want to.
• An extra day's paid leave each year to volunteer for a cause close to your community or your heart.
• Big moment day - an extra day’s paid leave for a moment that matters to you - like getting married, moving house or welcoming a new addition to the family (human or furry!)
• Help saving for your retirement - we'll match your company pension contributions up to 6% and you can contribute through salary sacrifice.
• Supportive and progressive people policies - we’re proud to have a range of policies to support people in their lives in and outside work, including enhanced family leave and policies to promote flexibility, inclusion and progression. We believe you shouldn’t have to wait to join us to know what to expect from us, which is why we share this overview of the policies we have in place to support families and carers. If there's something you want to understand more about, just ask - it won’t make a difference to your application.
• A healthcare cash plan - giving you money back for a range of medical expenses and fast access to doctor's appointments.
• Car lease scheme - you can buy a brand new electric or hybrid car through our leasing partner, and pay for it through salary sacrifice.
• Wellbeing support - including a 24/7 assistance programme for you and your family.
• Access to lots of discounts - including 15% off with Reach's very own online marketplace, Yimbly, where you can buy everything from homewares to beauty products.
• Interest-free loans - including for season tickets and technology.

Additional Information

Reach plc believes diversity brings benefits for our customers, our business and our people. This is why we are committed to being an inclusive employer and encourage applications from all suitable applicants irrespective of background, circumstances, age, disability, gender identity, ethnicity, religion or belief and sexual orientation.