Software Engineer

The Opportunity

Shorthand is a growing company that provides a digital publishing platform to many of the world's best-known publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there's never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has the rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being both investor-backed and comfortably profitable. We're a small team of geeks with art and heart and a high bar for quality.

To deliver our magic to customers and their audiences, we build software that is scalable, flexible, reliable and as simple as possible but no simpler.

The Role

We tend to do things a little differently at Shorthand. For one thing, we're a small team distributed around the world. For this role, we will accept applicants from anywhere in Europe or East-Coast USA, but applicants must be fluent in English.

This role will share responsibility for designing, engineering and scaling our storytelling features, systems and services.

We are looking for someone who:

• Is whip-smart, as demonstrated by career achievements and code school or university results.
• Has good knowledge of cloud-based web architectures.
• Has experience programming with JavaScript (and preferably experience or interest in TypeScript, React, Node.js and AWS or equivalent).
• Is familiar with using Git (and preferably GitHub).
• Has experience or knowledge, and a keen interest in CI/CD processes and writing tests.
• Has an extremely high bar for quality.
• Is thorough and detail-oriented.
• Can learn fast.
• Has great communication skills, particularly with respect to writing.
• Gains deep satisfaction from helping to make products better.
• Has experience or interest in working in a small business or startup environment.
• Preferably has experience collaborating with diverse, geographically dispersed teams.

Core Responsibilities:

• Deliver storytelling feature development and contribute to other areas of the product.
• Learn, evolve and improve an existing application/system architecture.
• Review code from other engineers and provide feedback.
• Help secure the environment.
• Contribute to the technical direction of the Shorthand tool.
• Report bugs and write tests.
• Communicate with the customer support team and often directly with customers to suggest solutions to issues.
• Assist in the creation of product documentation when required.

Qualifications:

• A minimum of 1 year of experience in web application development.
• Strong knowledge of JavaScript and the web.
• University qualifications in computer science, or a closely related field, or equivalent career experience or completion of code school courses.

Personality Attributes:

• You are a proactive self-starter who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful to find solutions to any challenge.
• You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment and possess a high level of intellectual curiosity.
• You are collaborative.
• You find fulfilment in the job itself and happiness in a job well done.