Senior Software Engineer / Dev Team Lead - Remote

About the role

We are looking to augment our fully-remote multi-disciplinary product development and engineering team with a Senior Software Engineer / Dev Team Lead (or Deputy Team Lead), who relishes crafting elegant solutions to hard technical and business problems using whatever is the best tool for the job.

The successful candidate will support our dev team in furthering our mission to provide access to the best journalism from a wide plurality of sources.

Please note: candidates who apply may alternatively be considered for a Senior Software Engineer / Deputy Dev Team Lead position.

The right candidate will:

• Be highly numerate and analytical, backed by a mathematics, computer science, stats or physics degree (or equivalent experience)
• Have excellent high-level language coding skills in any of e.g. Perl, Python, C/C++, Go, Rust, NodeJS, Java and a language-agnostic attitude
• Have experience of Perl, Python 3 and NodeJS and a willingness to work with these or learn them fast
• Have strong scripting skills (Bash, Perl, Python)
• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to engage authoritatively in technical discussions around the specifications of projects
• Be confident with Linux server/system administration
• Have experience with containerised workloads using Docker
• Bring a strong appetite for learning new skills and be open to new technologies, but not a slave to them
• Have two years experience of training, mentoring and running teams on a sprint system and be willing to lead or deputise

The right candidate will also have understanding and experience of at least 3 of the following:

• Natural language processing
• Designing and implementing distributed or large-scale systems
• MySQL/SQL database design, query optimisation
• Using or evaluating ML models in Keras, Tensorflow or Torch
• Basic web development skills e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue/React
• Apache web server software and related modules
• Cloud platforms and concepts (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
• Setup, testing and administration of CI/CD pipelines
• Networking and firewalling

Responsibilities for this role will include the following:

• Helping allocate work to individual developers, keeping a focus on business priorities and how they further the company's mission
• Supporting team members in their work and learning
• Fostering a collaborative environment and exploratory approach
• Monitoring, assessing and reporting on team progress and performance

• Developing and maintaining a detailed understanding of, and striving to become an authority on, all NewsNow's systems and languages
• Scoping, designing and developing across frontend and especially backend subsystems
• Upholding standards (e.g. in maintainability, security, scalability, efficiency)
• Squashing all the bugs other developers cannot

• Dell R630/R640 servers running Debian Linux and containerised workloads (Docker Swarm)
• Replicated databases (MySQL) and volume management using LVM and ZFS
• Firewall (iptables/nftables) and dynamic routing protocols (BGP, OSPF)
• Participation in on-call rotation, resolving production outages

On-the-job training will be provided on the specific application of these technologies in our stack.

NewsNow is a rare UK-based .com success story: a news organisation using technology to support and promote credible, independent and public interest journalism, via the extremely successful news aggregation and discovery platform NewsNow.co.uk.

Founded in 1997 to democratise and disrupt the market for news, NewsNow has since become a global top 50 news website with millions of loyal users who discover news from thousands of publishers.

• Open: we share and collaborate within and across departments
• Rigorous: We like to be clear about what we're doing, and why. Experimentation and peer-review are in our DNA
• One team, one vision: no office politics
• An appreciative environment: expect to hear 'thanks' a lot
• Room to grow: development of skills and responsibilities is encouraged and rewarded
• Virtual: we are today a fully-remote company with occasional in-person get-togethers
• Family-friendly and flexible: we offer flexible working, and understand sometimes personal needs come first