Full Stack Software Engineer

Talis (a wholly owned subsidiary of SAGE Publishing) is an edTech company focused on applying technology to make teaching and learning more connected in higher education. We help universities, libraries, faculty and students to connect to the digital resources they teach and learn with, but more importantly to collaborate and engage with these resources.

We have an established and market leading presence in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. We have well over 1.5million students and 100,000 academics using our products every day. We have two products at different stages in the product life cycle, and are now focused on growth of our more established product Talis Aspire, into large untapped markets and replicating our success of growth in our existing markets for our earlier stage product, Talis Elevate.

We are a fully distributed team of passionate people with a culture that is informal, we have a fairly flat structure and we value accountability, delivering impact, transparency, collaboration and solving meaningful problems and customers success.

You’ll be working in a friendly team that works closely and collaboratively, and supports each other in a safe environment. We have a shared commitment to our mission and goals, we like to deliver visible and measurable impact frequently, and to build and do the right things. We enable each other to continue learning, grow and to be always improving. We also like to get to know each other and have fun along the way.

You will work as part of the engineering team, reporting to our CTO, comfortable working in teams that take pride in their code and have a structured approach to product development. You will be excited by transforming our impact onto higher education globally and be looking for a role that both inspires and challenges you.

We are looking for an experienced full stack developer to join one of our development teams. You should be a polyglot programmer with experience on products with scale, performance and durable code and process.

Our products were originally built exclusively in PHP, but we have largely migrated to a microservices architecture implemented in a variety of technologies including React, Angular, NodeJS, and PHP. The emphasis is on the right tool for the job, rather than worship at any particular technology alter.

We run our services and applications totally within Amazon Web Services making use of Kubernetes, EC2, and Serverless technologies but you do not need to be familiar with these.

We make extensive use of NoSQL technology. Our core data platform is currently MongoDB but we also use Redis, DynamoDB, Redshift, and PostgreSQL.

We track, time and monitor everything that moves. Currently we’re using a combination of Sensu, PagerDuty, Instana, and Prometheus.

It is only desirable, not essential, that you have experience in some or all of the technologies we use today. After all, they may not be the exact same set we use in 18 months time.

The important thing is that you can demonstrate you are a quick learner, select and use technologies on their own merit, and can apply sound theory in your decisions and code.

Requirements:

• Your job is to work with the rest of the development team to ensure new features – and new products – delight customers, ship on time, and are of a high quality.
• We’re looking for a developer, not just a great programmer – so your ability to question a spec and come up with a better outcome for the user is just as important as your ability to implement it.
• You’ll enjoy scaling and building for hundreds of thousands of users just as much as shipping a shiny new product to hundreds.
• You’ll be courageous in your approach to technology and not be afraid to undertake major changes if that is what is required to get the job done.
• You’ll share our appetite for unit testing, automated testing and continuous integration. You’ll likely have opinions on how to improve our approach to all three.
• Your code will be self-documenting, exhibit sensible and recognisable patterns, and your designs will be capable of being easily refactored as we scale, grow and further develop our products.
• Everyone is encouraged to ask a lot of questions here, so you should be ready for people to challenge and feedback on your approach and ideas, and vice versa.
• We are a fun, small, smart and close knit team. Every individual is expected to make a real and tangible difference to our success.
• We develop our people, our average tenure is over 5 years and now as part of the SAGE group, we can offer superb career progression for developers who are keen for new challenges.
• Able to work 100% remotely, but also able to travel for occasional company meetups.
• We’re open and transparent, and those that share in our values thrive and stay with us for many years.

Benefits:

• We are a values based company that uses words like trust, accountability and customer success and actually live them, most of our team are remote and we have worked hard to ingrain this in our culture.
• In addition to a very competitive salary, we offer:
• An exceptionally generous contributory pension scheme.
• Private medical insurance (after induction period).
• Immediate cover on an exceptional Health Cash Plan (including dental and optical cover).
• Flexible working hours – although we are small we have people on three continents and at many locations across the UK.
• Transparent reporting – every team communicates progress weekly to everybody – and you are free to ask questions or make suggestions.
• Equipment support to ensure you have the right working from home setup.

We are a fully distributed company and are open to applicants across the UK, we are an equal opportunities employer and have a strong diverse team.

Before you apply, please check if any restrictions apply in terms of time zone or country.

This job has a geo-restriction in place: UK Only.