Job Description – Senior Developer
Name of employer: White Space Communications Limited
Job title: Senior Developer
Location: Remote working or UK office based (City centre location, Sheffield S1)
Reporting to: The Interactive Director
Job type: Part or full time (Minimum 22.5 hours per week)
Job summary
Whitespace are looking for an experienced rails developer to join our team. For the right candidate, we are flexible on location, either based remotely from Poland or working from our city centre location in Sheffield, UK.
Ideally full time, the position requires someone who can work under their own initiative who respects commercial pressures to complete work on time and within budget. If English is not your first language, you should be able to communicate effectively using it (spoken and written).
Please send your CV to hr@white-space.co.uk
Whitespace – company overview
Whitespace is a highly successful, brand communications agency working across multiple channels. We are a small agency (15 employees in total) with a blue chip national and international client base. Our focus is powerful ideas, outstanding technical ability and excellent client care.
Our digital team is overseen and managed by the Interactive Director and is a mix of open source backend developers, front end coders, Flash developers, project managers, SEO experts and website UX designers. The digital team collaborates closely with project managers and the creative team on all projects. The digital team has a number of high profile clients including Energiser, Iceland Foods, Channel 4, Discovery Networks, Jacuzzi, Experian Plc and others.
The Senior Developer will work alongside the Interactive Director and the lead developer to help drive our success in terms of the development of websites and web applications. In addition he/she will lead by example working alongside the interactive director to ensure the future development and smooth running of the interactive department. The Senior Developer will also be responsible for mentoring middleweight and junior members of the development team here in the UK ensuring that best practices are being implemented at all times to ensure high quality digital solutions.
Benefits summary
Salary - Up to 35k GBP Full time (Depending on location and experience)
Ad hoc bonus scheme (based on company and individual performance)
33 days holiday p/annum (total entitlement including any statutory & public holidays)
Access to development opportunities
Free car parking
Use of company’s villa in Spain
Principle responsibilities
Working alongside developers ensuring all code is written to a set standard and that best practices are employed at all times
Working alongside the Interactive Director to identify and recommend appropriate technologies and advancements on which to base future client projects
Delivery of software development services with a high level of customer satisfaction and in a profitable manner
Assist the Directors in implementing new digital service programs where necessary
Ensure a thorough understanding of customer expectations through meetings with Project Directors.
Coach and mentor middleweight and junior developers where necessary.
Assist the Directors with recruitment, selection, training, development and evaluation of middleweight and junior developers, where necessary.
Responsibility for the maintenance and improvement of the Whitespace development environment (hardware and software)
Server and DNS admin on external servers (Chef managed servers running Ubuntu Linux)
Working alongside the Interactive Director on project scoping, specification and estimates
Ability to manage multiple projects and tasks to completion.
Advising on implementation methodologies
Attending client technical meetings and liaising with 3rd parties where required
Being able to discuss technical issues in a clear and positive way to non-technical audiences
Working with directors and clients ensuring projects are completed on time and budget
Keeping fully abreast of latest thinking in all areas of web development and advising the directors accordingly
Essential requirements
Over 4 years commercial development experience
Fluent in Ruby
Modern RESTful approach to Ruby on Rails development
Using distributed version control systems as part of the daily development workflow (e.g. Git)
System Administration and deploying Rails apps on a variety of Linux based environments
MySQL and dealing with large volumes of data
Creating technical documentation
Experience of MySQL and dealing with large volumes of data
Experience of launching new servers and configuring from scratch
Experience of Git, Capistrano
A Linux all rounder, capable of diagnosing and solving problems on remote servers, knowledge of Opscode Chef is a plus.
Essential aptitudes
An enthusiastic approach
Thrives on a challenge
Enjoys working in an exciting, young and inspirational team
Capable of mastering new programming languages/libraries quickly
Have the skill to pick the best/fastest tools for the job in hand
Experience in the following is desirable:
Working in an agile, flexible environment.
RSpec/Cucumber with Behaviour/Test Driven Development
JavaScript, JQuery, PHP
Developing mobile applications
Knowledge of Opscode Chef, Refinery CMS and Spree E-commerce
Configuring Linux web, database, mail servers
Using Amazon AWS
Up to date front-end development skills CSS3, HTML5 etc.
Integrating with 3rd party system and payment systems such as Sagepay