Remote Heroku + Postgres Jobs

VPD is hiring a remote full-stack engineer to help develop and implement our groundbreaking cloud solution, contributing across all aspects of our app, its data, architecture and deployment.

We’re a well-funded scaleup (no VC money) with big plans to revolutionise legal pricing: our software aims to bring an end to law firms overcharging clients, arbitrary pricing, and other bad practices that have existed for years.

Our two directors are recognised world authorities in this domain, we are recognised suppliers to Thomson Reuters and Aderant Legal Software. We've successfully onboarded one of the world's largest legal teams and we're now busy preparing to deploy to some of the top 100 law firms in the UK and abroad.

Our app is powered by React, with Apollo Client for its GraphQL queries and mutations. It leverages Ant Design as the UI framework, upon which we build a mixture of UI components; some simple, some complex. 

On the back-end, we're using PostgreSQL as our RDS, TypeORM as our ORM, TypeGraphQL to define the API schema, and Apollo Server to deliver the GraphQL.

Both our front and back ends are coded in TypeScript. We believe in end-to-end testing and have therefore used Playwright to handle an automated E2E test script which runs before deployments.

The work is varied, challenging, and we place equal emphasis on front and back-end; we need to deliver scheduled features, fix bugs, and respond to the needs of newly onboarded firms.

Qualities and skills sought 

• A good technical understanding of software engineering principles 
• Adept with React, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL and GraphQL
• Proficient with SQL, TypeORM or similar
• An interest in upholding data security principles and helping us choose and implement effective application architectures
• Ability to unpack complex requirements
• A collaborative, adaptable, user-centred approach

You may also bring - or like to learn within the role

Ant Design | TypeORM | TypeGraphQL | Apollo Client | Apollo Server | Java | CircleCI | Heroku | Auth0 | AWS | TDD | Agile | Domain-driven design (DDD) | data modelling | integration patterns

Salary and benefits

• £70,000 - £90,000 - reviewed at six months - we're keeping an open mind
• Share scheme for formative team members (once proven value to the business)
• 25 days holiday, plus public holidays and a day for your birthday
• Flexible working practices - tell us what you need
• Personal development plan that you can shape, with budget for related training/certifications
  
  

About us

VPD has developed groundbreaking software that enables law firms to better understand and fairly price their fees. We are the authority for legal pricing and our software has attracted the attention of the largest firms in numerous countries, with a number of partnerships and customers signed. 

We're now strengthening our fully-remote development team, offering a culture where you will work under your own initiative towards common goals. It's an opportunity to be a formative team member, joining a friendly flat-structured team that operates without ego, and to grow and improve together. https://www.vpd.law

Location: fully remote, within the UK only

Even if your CV isn't ready, please talk with Vittoria to find out more:

0117 318 2447 | [email protected]

RECRUITERS: Cold calling or speculative applications are not welcomed.

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• Built a fleet of handwriting robots driven by Ruby on Rails.
• Built support for single-use unique coupon codes in direct mail campaigns 
• Built the ability for Shopify brands (our users) to send real handwritten notes (postcards in envelopes, with real pens) with live in-browser previews
• Created a Public API for sending postcards and handwritten notes in our production facility.
• Developing a load balancing strategy for “expensive” Sidekiq background jobs that were crushing external APIs and our queues.
• Improved developer experience with Heroku (Pipelines, CI, and Review apps), Github Actions
• Deep dive into expensive queries in our application and working to improve performance and memory consumption from Postgres to Rails
• Built a webhook event publishing system for events from our production facility.
• Upgraded our main application to Rails 7 with import maps and hotwire.

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Do you want to develop software that helps scientists, doctors, historians, and all other kinds of researchers discover breakthroughs? Join our small, fully-remote software development team to build software that connects scholars of all disciplines with the peer-reviewed journal articles they need to advance their research. 

Since our remote-first company's founding in 2011, Third Iron has created the industry-leading software services BrowZine and LibKey.  Our users include millions of students, doctors, industry researchers, and scientists affiliated with over 1,300 libraries at universities, hospitals, corporations, and government departments across 36 countries including places like Stanford University, NASA, Mayo Clinic, NHS England, and University of Hong Kong.

In a refreshing change from advertising-dependent tech companies or those who sell user data, we instead have a business-to-business model. We sell our subscription-based services to libraries that may be used by anyone affiliated with them. We do not sell user data.  Our focus is on building the best software to enable research that changes the world.

Your Role

As a Senior Full Stack Software Engineer, you will help with all aspects of the development lifecycle: initial architectural approaches, coding the automated tests and implementation, and reviewing changes with your teammates. Our product owners have a deep understanding of our customer needs and wants. The dev team collaborates with them closely to help get clear guidance and ensure what we build has maximum positive impact to our users in the world of libraries and peer-reviewed research journals.

Our remote-first company has been building software for over 11 years in a fully-distributed manner, so you’ll be joining a team with plenty of experience putting into practice what works well remotely, and avoiding what doesn’t. We try to build our products with an eye on the long term, since the new features and products we build are typically maintained by us for years into the future.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to our Third Iron tools and backend systems, written primarily in Node.js and Postgres, and used by our operations team to manage large amounts of data from over 1,300 library customers
• Help shape and build our APIs, used both internally and by third parties, written in Node.js and adopting many concepts from JSON API 1.0
• Increase your experience and knowledge of Node.js, Postgresql, Elasticsearch, CouchDB, continuous integration, and load testing. Learn about all the tools we use at our StackShare
• Optimize and help scale our Heroku and AWS cloud-based systems as our customer base grows to maintain solid performance for all users
• Opportunities to assist with our web app clients, BrowZine and LibKey, that are built with Ember, and our browser extension LibKey Nomad, built with React

What We’re Looking For

• SQL experience; we use Postgres to store the majority of our data, and maintaining very fast APIs and internal processes is important to us. Bonus if you have NoSQL experience, such as ElasticSearch or CouchDB
• NodeJS and JavaScript interest and experience
• Strong communication skills – since we are a remote team, clear, timely, and frequent communication is essential
• Experience writing automated tests alongside your code – we rely on numerous automated tests to help avoid regressions, both at the acceptance and unit level
• Source control expertise, ideally git
• Self-motivation and comfort working independently, which we've found is important for remote working
• Interest in lifelong learning, including learning new technologies. We embrace the tools and techniques that help us build great software which lets us sleep soundly at night, with high confidence that our users are having a delightful experience and our servers are not catching fire
• People with U.S. work authorizations.  (We are looking for a full-time developer to join our team, so please, no software development firms looking to hire out contractors - we're interested in talking directly to software developers)

Working at Third Iron

Third Iron is a small company of 25 employees, and our growth and success have been fueled by the passionate, curious people who work here. We value input and feedback while looking to minimize the interruptions of meetings, report writing, and internal emails.

Understanding that work is just part of your life, Third Iron also provides benefits including health, dental, long-term disability, paid time-off, home-office stipend, and more. It's why most employees who work at Third Iron spend many years of their careers here.  You could, too! 

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