Overview

Wirecutter is seeking an experienced full stack engineer to join the team that is responsible for the application, APIs, and client interfaces that serve our product reviews and power our business. This is a new position on a team of two-plus engineers, reporting to the engineering manager and working closely with engineers, product managers, and designers. Successful candidates thrive in a fast-paced environment, think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate, solve problems, write quality code, and ship features that achieve business goals.

As a full stack engineer you play a pivotal role in building a best-in-class product platform. You should be comfortable working remotely. Ideally, you have experience working on a distributed development team.

We have a strong focus on scale, reliability, performance, and product agility, and that means picking the right tool for the job while being pragmatic and flexible.

The tech stack for the platform team mainly consists of:

  • Laravel — PHP framework
  • Composer — dependency management
  • Vue JS
  • Grunt/Gulp — task automation
  • Sass/CSS — markup styles

This is a remote (US-only) contract position expected to last three to six months.

About Wirecutter:

Founded five years ago by journalists fed up with the time and energy it takes to shop, Wirecutter developed a simpler approach to giving buying advice: Just tell people exactly what to get in one single guide. The company’s purpose: to help people find great things, quickly and easily. Through rigorous testing, research, reporting, and whatever means necessary, we create straightforward recommendations that save readers unnecessary stress, time, and effort. We then monetize these guides by enabling our readers to easily purchase the products they are interested in.

Wirecutter was recently acquired by, and is now a subsidiary of, The New York Times Company. As part of the acquisition, The Times is investing in Wirecutter to accelerate its business through editorial category expansion, development of more robust product features, and unlocking of new revenue streams.

Responsibilities

  • Translate UI/UX wireframes to visual elements
  • Build scalable, high-quality, and innovative solutions and features
  • Write code that is simple, reliable, maintainable, performant, functional, and compatible across devices and browsers
  • Design applications with extensibility in mind, while considering efficiency and the burden of developer onboarding
  • Debug issues reported in our production environment
  • Provide level-of-effort estimates and specifications for upcoming project tasks
  • Understand requirements, discuss trade-offs, and collaborate on the best approach to solving a problem
  • Succinctly communicate complex problems and proposed solutions, in writing and in conversation
  • Perform code reviews with meaningful feedback
  • Test and troubleshoot with automated testing or manual quality assurance

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of experience with PHP, including Laravel or another MVC frameworks
  • 3+ years of experience with JavaScript, jQuery, NPM, and the Document Object Model API
  • 3+ years of experience styling client-side views with CSS or Sass
  • Understanding of object-oriented software principles, unit testing, acceptance testing, and design patterns
  • Experience developing and consuming restful Web services
  • Experience working closely with design and product teams throughout the product development life cycle
  • A deep understanding of software development, working collaboratively as part of a multidisciplinary team with a track record of shipping software on time
  • Curiosity and vision: You have a passion for technology and can think critically about performance, scalability, and reliability of software
  • Comfortable working without micro-management of day-to-day tasks
  • Experience with version control and basic shell scripting

Nice-to-haves

  • Experience with Vue JS or other JavaScript frameworks
  • Experience working with Elasticsearch
  • Experience with the JSON API specification
  • Working knowledge of AWS and Docker
  • Familiarity with WordPress or any other CMS

About The Wirecutter

The Wirecutter, and its associated sites, are about helping people find the best gear to buy using dozens of hours of research of all available sources and our own testing.

What’s different in how we do things is our directness in recommending people exactly what we would buy ourselves or recommend to our loved ones--we don’t ask people who are looking for our advice to click through multiple pages of reviews or meaningless industry news to exploit them for advertising inventory. We just give them our recommendation in a single page, and the evidence of why that is and why they should believe us, and let them them get on with their lives. It's that simple.

You may be aware that we run our company in service of our readers. Less known is our commitment to the people with which we work. We ask everyone who works here to be effective, to be efficient, and to move the needle every day.

In exchange, we offer you the ability to work from wherever on your own hours for competitive pay at a reasonable pace. We love working with people who can get it done in a world-class way and can communicate well with a team, and who know how to enjoy a balanced life outside of work.

Salary and perks: Although we are a small, bootstrapped company, we pride ourselves in offering competitive compensation including, but not limited to, healthcare coverage, PTO, and a flexible work schedule. We want to make sure every employee is happy and has the tools, resources, and knowledge to grow with the company.