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Tech Lead - Frontend

Permanent employee, Full-time · London
Your mission

Salary: up to £100,000/year, hybrid working, minimum 2 days in our Bloomsbury studio.


About Wonderbly


Wonderbly is the world’s leading personalised publishing company, and Children’s Publisher of the year 2021. We conceive, design, promote, sell, and make unique books for wonderful customers all over the world.Our mission is to make people feel extraordinarily special, and bring them closer to the people they love, through the power of personalised stories. So far we’ve shipped over 8 million books to over 150 countries. We’ve done this in just nine years, and we’re just getting started.

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced frontend software engineer to lead a small team of frontend devs to build out our new stack to deliver the future of wonderbly.com. This is the third generation, or V3, of Wonderbly’s website stack. We have big plans that we’d like to talk to you about.

You will be a key person in the Technology team, managing 3 developers inside a larger squad led by a very experienced Ecommerce Product Manager. You’ll be joining our tight and growing team of in-house developers, analysts and product designers to ensure we are building the right experiences to delight our customers.

Your team consists of a super experienced senior, a very talented mid-weight and a QA automation engineer who knows the edgiest edge cases. Together, building on our brand new frontend stack (more on that below) you will be building out the third generation of wonderbly.com.

We are absolutely customer focused and everything we do is about improving their experiences. We are continually testing and optimising to make the website the best it can possibly be. We obsess about the details and this role would suit someone who intuitively thinks in this way.

Lastly and most importantly, we're a people first company. That's why we will need you to be a teacher, explainer, mentor as well as a coder and manager. People in your team and outside it will want to work with and learn from you. 

About our stack

Our frontend codebase is brand new. Our legacy website (v2) is being replaced route by route with our new frontend stack. We have made the following key technology choices: Astro for its super fast rendering, Typescript, Vite, Storybook, Radix and a bunch of others. Our code is in GitHub, using Turborepo and pnpm. Everything is packaged into a Docker container and hosted on Heroku.

We make the effort to avoid unnecessary complexity by thinking before coding. We will expect you to help us get even better at this and show us when we can speed up vs slow down. When our implementations are simple and easy to reason, then we know we are doing it right.

In the next 12 months you’ll be

  • Setting us on a path towards a more personalised product discovery experience for our customers

  • Obsessing about real-world user experience: loading performance, interactivity and site stability

  • Scaling our technology to keep pace with our publishing roadmap and expansion into new categories
    Experimenting and optimising our scoping & delivery processes and building a first in class dev team

  • Ensuring our systems are secure and can scale, leading efforts to ensure this before peak trading events and being on-call to help with any problems

  • Regularly presenting in our Engineering Weekly meetings, helping others learn from your knowledge and experience


A little bit about you
 What we need from you

  • Deep understanding of designing and building complex frontends for customer facing companies like ours

  • Love finding the right balance between speed vs quality and can easily communicate why when you choose one over the other

  • Experience managing developers and supporting their development by giving them career plans and championing their achievements

  • Find joy in programming and relish making tough design decisions by comparing the many languages/tools/libraries that you might use to solve a problem

  • Love of helping others who can learn from your experience

  • Always challenging yourself and others to be better and improve

  • Appreciation of nicely designed, high-quality, well tested codebases - and ability to communicate why they’re important

  • An instinctive and easy empathy with all colleagues

Why us?

Why you’ll love working at Wonderbly

First and foremost, you should join Wonderbly because of the work we do. We’re on a mission to bring our meaningfully personalised products to everyone around the world. You’ll be surrounded by inclusive, diverse and self-motivated people inspired by this exciting mission.

We're a profitable and responsibly run business. There is an excellent work/life balance with clear processes and sensible expectations. We have a strongly supportive and inclusive culture and are still small enough where individuals can make a big difference.

We have exciting growth plans, we want to create deeper connections between customers and their important relationships into the heart of our books.

On top of that, you can expect:

-   Salary up to £100,000 p/a

-   28 days holiday, plus 8 bank holidays

-   Pension scheme with matched contributions

-   Health insurance to keep you and your family in tip-top shape

-   Lunch and Learn sessions with exciting speakers and in-depth technical topics

We are remote-friendly with a flexible hybrid policy. You are welcome to work at our lovely, well appointed studio in Bloomsbury at any time. Our current policy is to come in two days a week, on Thursday for a team day and another day that suits you. You can work from anywhere five weeks a year, as long as there's overlap with most of our working day.  

At our studio there are:

-   Showers, secure bike parking facilities, and we are part of the Cycle To Work scheme

-   Heaps of snacks, drinks, and comforts in our fully-stocked kitchen

-   Team yoga classes; just one of the many ways we keep centred and calm

-   Clubs for bookworms, runners, gardeners and aspiring poets    

Our simple hiring process

1. Introduction - 30-minute intro call with our Head of Talent, Mike to find out more and see if there’s a match

2. Call - 30 mins call or in-person chat with Rob (CTO) and Yuri (Platform Tech Lead) to meet in more detail and get to know each other better

2. Interview - Meet our wider team for about 2 hours. Our process is super relaxed, we explain more about the role and talk to you about your experience. No preparation needed. We are people focused and this is reflected in the way we interview.

3.  Offer - if successful, we aim to offer quickly, usually in a few working days.

If you’re thinking about us but not sure about yet, please get in touch anyway. Come visit our studio first just to take a look, we'll be thrilled to show you around.

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About us
Oh hi! We’re delighted that you’re interested in working with Wonderbly, the UK Children’s Publisher of the Year 2021. Below you’ll find out all about us, our mission and values, and the roles we have open right now.  
 

Wonderbly is the world’s leading personalised publishing company. We conceive, design, promote, sell, and make wonderful books for wonderful customers all over the world.

Our mission is to make people feel extraordinarily special, and bring them closer to the people they love, through the power of personalised stories. So far we’ve shipped over 8 million books to over 150 countries. We’ve done this in just eight years, and we’re just getting started.

Getting personalised books to all those millions of customers requires a multidisciplinary team. Our wonderful people have experience across editorial design, research, production, software engineering, marketing, e-commerce, data analysis, print-on-demand manufacturing, shipping… the list goes on.

This means that Wonderbly is a collaborative and creative place to work, with lots of opportunities for growth and development across a broad range of skills.

We’re based in London, where we have a gorgeous, light-filled studio for working together. But like many digital-first companies, we have a hybrid operating model, with many colleagues working from home and further afoot much of the time.

Our values

Wonderbly’s values were born from the three qualities at the heart of ‘Lost My Name’ - our original and best-selling personalised children’s book. These values are Courage, Curiosity and Kindness. And although they naturally have a child-friendly ring to them, these are deeply human values that we believe everyone should live by.

Courage means taking calculated risks and trying things that no one else would. It means setting audacious goals, seeing them through, and being willing to be wrong.

Curiosity means investing in learning, never losing sight of the ‘WHY’. Curiosity allows us to ask silly questions, explore our blind spots, and dip into other disciplines for inspiration.

Kindness is at the heart of our culture: it’s no coincidence that deep friendships form here every day. Kindness means making space for one another, inclusivity as standard, and clear, direct communication. It does not mean “good vibes only”: the kindest conversations are often the hardest.

Equal opportunities employer

Our team is committed to providing equal opportunities for employment regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, disability, family structure, socio-economic status, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other basis (it's the law, but it's also just the right thing to do).

If you have a disability, caring duties, or any other additional needs that require consideration, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them during the application process. 

To see more about our business and products, you can visit us at Wonderbly.com

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We can't wait to meet you! 
Thank you for taking an interest in Wonderbly. Please fill out the following short form. If you have any difficulties, please send an email to careers@wonderbly.com. 

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