Staff Frontend Engineer

More than 75,000 businesses across the world have made Sedex their trusted partner in creating a more socially and environmentally sustainable supply chain.

From our platform’s unrivalled data insights to our team’s expert guidance, Sedex makes it easy for companies to manage, assess and report on sustainability performance.

Our Vision is to be a leader in making global supply chains more socially and environmentally sustainable.

Our Mission is to supply data-driven insight through the most accessible tools and services. We engage with companies and our community to continuously improve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes.

The role

We are looking for a highly skilled and forward-thinking Staff Frontend Engineer to join us and provide technical guidance and leadership to multiple product delivery teams. You will lead a guild of Frontend Engineers from a technical point of view, but without line management responsibilities. This is a hands-on role where your time will be split between shepherding our technical approach and the shape of the solutions we produce, and hands-on coding.

Key responsibilities

In the first 3 months you will

• Gain an understanding of existing frontend technologies, architecture, codebase, workflows, and developer experience (DX)
• Understand the overall architectural landscape in which these components exist
• Start understanding the need for and analysing cross-cutting concerns that have an impact across the department such as frontend architecture, a reusable component library etc.
• Build relationships with key people across teams and functions such as (but not limited to) Tech Leads, Product Designers, and other Senior/Staff Engineers
• Take leadership of the Frontend Engineering guild within Sedex
• Understand and settle into our team/department processes and cycles, and start forming ideas on how they can be improved
• Develop a solid grounding in your understanding of the business and how it operates

Ongoing responsibilities

The scope of your responsibilities will be across the Frontend Engineering guild as well as the frontend function of all the delivery teams. The Frontend Engineering guild is a loose team of all frontend engineers at Sedex who work together to ensure an excellent experience for users (UX) as well as for developers (DX).

Responsibilities around the frontend guild

• Providing technical leadership and coaching to the guild members, and continuously foster a culture of quality and excellence
• Ensuring that the technical and architectural direction is aligned across the department, keeping industry best practices in mind
• Ensuring the architecture of the frontend code enables our goals – autonomous teams, continuous delivery and a great user experience
• Designing and implementing a reusable component library that implements the UX patterns developed by the Product Design team
• Prioritising the backlog for the Frontend Engineering guild in consultation with the guild members, Tech Leads and other tech leaders
• Screening CVs, interviewing (and other recruitment activities) of Frontend Engineers to be hired at Sedex

  Responsibilities across all delivery teams, focused on frontend aspects

  • Supporting teams’ deliveries by being available for consulting and coaching on an ad-hoc basis
  • Working closely with Tech Leads and Product Managers to implement frontend components and decisions into teams
  • Working closely with Tech Leads and Product Managers to balance Frontend Engineers’ time spent in the team vs the guild
  • When required, temporarily joining a team to help with complex technical tasks
  • Supporting teams during product and technical discoveries, including helping build proofs-of-concept and prototypes
  • Supporting teams with design and technical decisions, keeping in mind alignment and consistency across the department
  • Proactively seeking out difficult impediments to a team’s efficiency (“technical debt”), proposing and implementing solutions that will enable the team to iterate faster
  • Ensuring that teams cover non-functional requirements to a high standard, including accessibility, security and performance

Communication

• Close collaboration (team dynamics) with all engineers in the frontend guild
• Close collaboration with the Tech Leads of teams in your area to be aware of teams’ needs
• Acting as an ambassador for the Tech Department, interacting with stakeholders across all levels of the organisation
• Close collaboration with other functions (e.g. Product, UX, etc.) early in the process, ensuring technical considerations are appropriately represented and considered in any decisions that are made

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

You should have:

• 5+ years’ experience of working in tech teams at a senior level
• Exceptional technical skills both at systems level as well as code level (hands-on)
• A strong appreciation of and experience in dealing with accessibility, responsiveness, security and performance on the frontend
• Strong test automation skills
• A pragmatic approach to trade-offs involved in software engineering
• Excellent communication skills, adapting to different audiences (tech/non-tech, engineers/executives)
• A strong desire towards (and experience of) mentoring and coaching others
• Strong experience of working with Agile methodologies
• A results-oriented mindset
• A strong sense of accountability

You should be:

• Self-directed and capable of working in a dynamic environment with high attention to detail
• Naturally collaborative and approachable
• Able to convey complex information in an easily understandable manner
• Willing to initiate honest and open conversations across all levels
• Enthusiastic and engaging in convincing others of your ideas, and able to motivate them to buy into initiatives without needing to rely upon hierarchy
• Able to use the relationships you’ve built to explore and challenge ideas, and to influence decisions and outcomes
• Comfortable in holding difficult conversations, and skilled in approaching them in a forthright yet sensitive and constructive manner
• Positive in the face of change, and an advocate for continuous evolution of the team and its capabilities
• The sort of person who naturally steps forwards to take responsibility

Our culture

At Sedex, we are passionate about helping businesses become truly sustainable and ethical across their operations and supply chains. We believe that all people have the right to a safe workplace, where they are treated with respect and paid fair wages, free of harassment and discrimination. We strive to achieve these beliefs through inclusive behaviours that embody our values of being collaborative, responsible, transparent, quality driven and committed to service excellence.

We want everyone to feel they can be themselves and thrive at work - in every country, in everything we do, every day. We are focused on providing a culture characterised by inclusive everyday behaviours built on a foundation of respect and appreciation for diversity in all its forms.

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