Staff/Senior Frontend Engineer and Chapter Lead

Job Description

About Viamo: At Viamo, we envision a world where all people have access to the information they need to make decisions for healthy, prosperous lives, and have meaningful relationships with governments, civil society, and businesses.With more than 300 team members spread across 25 countries, and serving projects in more than 40 countries, we truly work on a global scale to catalyze a mobile tech movement. We are connecting nonprofits, governments, and businesses to the people they serve using the digital technologies they already have in their pocket (voice calls, interactive SMS, and social network chatbots). Tech teams are mostly based in Saskatoon Canada, but some of team members are in other cities (around Canada, USA, Europe, Latin America, and Africa)At Viamo we value Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. We know that diverse perspectives and experiences make our products, services, and teams stronger.If you think this job looks like something you want to do - Apply with an Intro Video!

We are looking for a Senior Full Stack Developer to join our growing, multinational team of engineers, designers and testers who are working passionately to help improve the quality of life for people in lower and middle-income countries through the creation of high quality digital services grounded in the principles of human-centered design to bridge the gaps of commerce, education and health. All our users need is a simple mobile phone and a mobile connection to get access to the information and services they need to succeed and thrive. 

• Generous vacation (unlimited - yes you heard that correctly!)
• Health benefits plan (a plan to make sure that you and your family are happy and healthy)
• Flexible work schedule. We understand that you and your family may have a busy schedule. We can accommodate that!
• Work from anywhere - the beach, a cabin in the woods, anywhere you have an internet connection and can be productive.
• Equipment to be productive. You’ll get a tech equipment allowance to make sure you are happy and efficient!
• Continuous learning opportunities and support for professional development. We want you to grow with us, and we will do anything we can to help!

Position: We are looking for a passionate and experienced Senior or Staff-level Front-end Engineer who will provide their Front-end expertise to our entire team (in a role that we call a “Chapter Lead”). You will be helping build software that is currently used in 40+ countries (primarily across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean) to give connectivity to people with limited technology. You will be part of a team that is building, scaling, and maintaining Viamo's products including our large-scale web application and communication platform that processes 4 million+ interactions a day and positively impacts millions of lives. In our years ahead, we are aiming to scale our platform strategy to go beyond sharing information: connecting 100 million active users to vital services and many of the benefits of the digital economy.

At Viamo, all Engineers are part of one or more “Chapters”, which are guilds for a domain specialization, such as Front-end Engineering. We are looking to hire a Front-end “Chapter Lead”, which means that you will be responsible for guiding all of our Front-end Engineers and some Full Stack Engineers who want to improve their Front-end knowledge and skills. As such, you will use your expertise and passion to act as a multiplier for the output of the Engineering team. 

You will also get involved in helping out with technical designs, giving assistance to Engineers on deliverables, conducting code reviews and, when necessary, contributing code yourself. Your efforts will ensure that our applications create a delightful user experience for our users and are and are highly scalable, available, resilient and perform well on all devices.

We are looking for an Engineer who has been focusing on Front-end development for 10+ years and, ideally, has formal training in Computer Science or Software Engineering. Although we are looking for someone with general Front-end expertise, because of the nature of this role as a Chapter Lead, we have a strong preference for experience with our key Front-end tech stack components. We aim to power-up our developers with modern efficient frameworks, which currently include:

• Vue.js
• Typescript
• ESLint
• Webpack

(The list above are the key Front-end technologies; other technologies in our stack include AWS, PHP, Laravel, MySQL, BigQuery, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, BitBucket, Github, etc.)

Strong written and verbal communication skills are a prerequisite, as we are a very team-oriented company working remotely with colleagues across the world, so clear communication is central to our success. We appreciate people who balance thinking long-term and pursuing technical excellence, and are focused on delivering value to users. We are experienced Agile / Scrum practitioners and we operate in multi-disciplinary product crews towards shared success.

If you are an independent, self-starting and quality-minded developer with top-notch communication and analytical skills, we would like to talk to you.

Key Responsibilities

As Front-end Chapter Lead, your days will be varied. Your general responsibilities will include:

• Providing guidance and consultation to individual Engineers on Front-end design, development or debugging as needed.
• Providing advice to an entire Product Crew (our name for our Scrum teams) when there is a specific Front-end challenge that requires your deep expertise. This could be for half an hour or for several Sprints, depending on the complexity of the challenge.
• Co-evolve architectural and technical standards - with your experience, we would expect you to guide the team to be better by creating standards and best practices in Front-end development.
• Researching new tools and techniques - we want you to be constantly on the lookout for how we can improve, which includes process changes, as well as the introduction of new tools and approaches.
• Training - it will be your responsibility to determine and fulfil the training needs of the Chapter. 
• Hiring - as one of our most experienced Front-end Engineers, we would expect your involvement in the hiring of Front-end Engineers, as well as helping refine the process of selecting those Engineers.
• Engineering Backlog - since you will have visibility to all the Front-end work across our Crews, you will be the curator of the Front-end Engineering Backlog.
• Collaborating with other teams and disciplines within Viamo (e.g., Design/UX, Product Management, Country teams and external partners).

Interview Process

• Introduction round
• Assessment Round
• 2 Technical rounds 1 with cofounder and 1 with engineering manager
• Final round