Frontend Web Developer (for arts, academic, non-profit projects)

We need a front-end developer to join our team and help us build well thought-out, highly usable web sites and web applications for our clients. You’re looking for a satisfying work environment, good colleagues, and a challenging job that doesn’t ask you to spend every waking minute working or on call. If we’re both lucky, we’ll be a perfect fit for each other.

You: A frontend developer with a solid grasp of HTML, CSS (+SCSS), and Javascript

To be a good fit for this position, you’ll need to be well versed in modern HTML and CSS. You’ll work closely with our other front-end developer to turn design comps into application views and CMS templates. On a typical project, your work will begin during the design phase, during which you’ll meet with internal or external UX and visual designers to review and discuss their designs as they come together. You’ll bring the perspective of someone who has experience implementing designs in front-end technologies to those discussions, and provide feedback to the designers based on that experience. When design is finalized, you will work with our other front-end developer and our internal project lead to architect the front-end development. On some projects, your role will be to provide guidance to our other frontend developer. On other projects, you will be the one building out the front-end.

You should have a strong grasp of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You should be able to take a design comp and turn it into well-tested, responsive markup that is flexible enough work as expected when incorporated into dynamic application views. While experience with modern javascript frameworks like React or Angular will be helpful, what’s more important is that you have a solid foundation in writing modern javascript. Ideally, you’ve at least explored tools like Babel and Webpack, and feel comfortable writing javascript that interacts with the DOM without relying on jquery.

Cast Iron: A Smart, Reliable, No-nonsense development team.

Cast Iron Coding is a web development studio. We build things—CMS driven websites, small brochure sites, large open-source applications, internal business web applications, backend APIs—for our clients. We take on a wide variety of projects, some more challenging, some less so. While we regularly use a variety of frontend and backend languages and technologies, all of our projects are built on the core web technologies of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Consequently, most, but not all, of our projects run in a browser.

Unlike many firms that turn jobs around quickly and move on to the next project, we’re in it for the long haul with all our clients, so we care a great deal about the craft that goes into what we build. We’ve been building web sites, web apps, and mobile apps since about 2004, for a wide variety of clients.

If you took a snapshot of what we’re working on right now, you’d see a company willing to take on a variety of different kinds of projects, including:

• We’re building two museum websites—one for a museum in California, and one for a museum in Florida.
• We’re building an open source, academic publishing platform called Manifold under a Mellon Foundation grant.
• We’re wrapping up development on a website for the David Hockney foundation, which will make thousands of Hockney’s works available online.
• We’re just getting started on a campaign site for a local non-profit that focuses on helping kids find foster parents
• We’re continuing to work on an internal identity management and authentication web app for a large audio equipment manufacturer down in CA.
• We’re doing a new round of development on a web app that encourages people to change their behavior so that it’s more eco-friendly and sustainable.
• We’re building a web application for a group of researchers at the University of Oregon that collects data about early childhood development.

One of the true pleasures of working at Cast Iron Coding is that we work on projects that interest us across a wide variety of sectors. We like working with small businesses, academics, nonprofits, and organizations we admire. But we also like sinking our teeth into a thorny, difficult enterprise project where revenue is at stake. We love a big challenge, and problems that make us think hard about what we’re building. We’ve been at this long enough now—about 12 years—and we’ve resisted growing fast or sacrificing quality. Our clients speak highly of us and, perhaps a better metric, our past employees who’ve moved on to greener pastures still come back to hang out and grab a beer with the team.

Equal Opportunity

Let’s face it. The field we work in—tech generally, programming specifically—has a diversity problem. Like many in the industry, we’d like to see this change. Cast Iron Coding is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to the principle of diversity. As such, we are particularly interested in receiving applications from a broad spectrum of people.

Requirements

We’re hoping to cast a wide net on this position, so take these requirements as a set of guidelines, rather than hard and fast rules. The more these bullets describe you, the stronger your application will likely be.

• You should probably have some college or higher education background. It’s not essential, but we want to see that you’re able to engage in critical thinking and analytical reasoning. These skills are crucial, in our experience, to good software architecture. Your background absolutely does not need to be in computer science. The owner of Cast Iron taught English literature for a decade, and we value a background in the humanities, as long as it’s matched by some technical experience.
• You need to have demonstrable experience writing responsive HTML and CSS. The more you’ve written, the better. We’re looking for someone who understands media queries, has used flexbox, and is comfortable with CSS transitions. Ideally, you understand why it matters whether the site has to support IE10, and how the decision around browser support affects what CSS techniques are available to you.
• You are well-versed in SCSS. We use Sass on all our projects, and we couldn’t live without it.
• You have a pretty strong grasp of Javascript, and have some experience (professional, ideally, but perhaps personal) writing modern javascript. You’re familiar with web APIs and what you don’t know, you can quickly find in MDN’s docs. While we don’t necessarily need you to be able to create a complex frontend application, we do want you to be able to create a complex UI component and control it’s behavior with Javascript.
• You are comfortable communicating with clients and working on a team. Our clients are our life-blood, and we’re not big on project managers, which means that developers tend to do a lot of face-to-face work with clients. We want people who are strong communicators, personable, and who can argue (kindly, tactfully) for the right development approach against clients who may not be as technically savvy as they are.
• You need to be able to show us that you’ve built something. In our experience, people who are well-suited for this kind of work almost inevitably find their way to a place where they built something with a computer, and that thing should show evidence of problem solving and creative thinking. Did you build a website that helps distribute your chickens’ eggs among your friends? Did you build a scheduling tool for your amateur farming cooperative? Did you build an enterprise order fulfillment system for a client? We’d like to see something you built, or at least hear about it.
• Ideally, you’ve worked with at least one Javascript framework. If that Javascript framework is Vue or React, which are what we mostly use these days, even better.
• Ideally, you’ve had some experience working on professional software projects, and you’re no stranger to working on a team: tracking features and bugs; adhering to shared code style and conventions; using Git for branching, merging, and rebasing; writing code that is easy to understand; and documenting your work as needed.
• You probably should be located in Portland and willing to work at the office. Many of our employees work remotely some of the time. One of our employees works remotely all of the time out of Colorado. That said, until you’re pretty well integrated in the team, we’ll want you working out of our office most of the time. If you’re the right person for this position, you might be able to change our mind on this.

Benefits

• You get to work with a team of programmers who are technically competent and who, additionally, bring a strong background in the humanities to their work.
• You will work in an environment where everyone is expected to embrace new languages, new frameworks, and new development practices as a matter of course. To this end, employees are encouraged—I’d say required, but nobody is really enforcing it—to spend 10% of their time learning something new or working on a side project or a challenging internal project.
• You will be given a reasonable starting salary, depending on your experience. This salary will almost certainly be less than what a startup flush with venture capital or a much larger company might offer. In return for making a little bit less money, we won’t make you go to (very many) pointless meetings, and we won’t expect you to give up your life outside of work to be successful at work. You’ll work regular 9-5 hours, and most of your time at work will be spent feeling productive. Moreover, if you stay at CIC for a while and prosper as a developer, your salary will increase each year. In addition to your salary, you will likely receive a substantial winter bonus each year.
• You will receive top-notch health insurance, including dental and nontraditional medicine. CIC will pay 50% of your health insurance premium on our group plan, as well as 50% of the insurance cost for your partner and, if you have them, your children.
• You will have the option of enrolling in our 401k plan
• You’ll be offered ample vacation and sick leave, as well as the ability to work remotely or keep somewhat flexible hours. Life-work balance matters, and we try hard to help employees stay happy as far as that goes.
• You’ll work in a great building with a small, tight-knit team. Washington High School is home to Revolution Hall, Marthas (a nice bar and cafe), New Seasons corporate offices, and a bunch of startups and agencies. It’s right next door to a dog park (which our office dogs love), and our space is comfortable and quiet. We get our coffee delivered each week, and our kitchen is generally well stocked. The environment is laid back and friendly, and on Fridays we sometimes quit early for a few rounds of highly competitive Towerfall.