Senior Frontend Developer

Senior Frontend Developer

Who we are

SPRINGER NATURE - springernature.com

Springer Nature employs more than 10,000 people in over 50 markets, and is home to some of the best-known names in research, educational and professional publishing.

Working at the heart of a changing industry, we are always looking for great people who care about delivering quality to our customers and the communities we work alongside. In return, we provide opportunities to learn from some of the best in the business, with a culture that encourages curiosity and empowers people to find solutions and act on their instincts.

SN DIGITAL - sndigital.springernature.com

SN Digital (SND) is a technology division of Springer Nature. We are responsible for maintaining and delivering millions of articles used by researchers, scientists and students around the globe.

There are around 230 of us in London, Berlin, Pune, New York, Madrid, Dordrecht, Heidelberg and - coming soon - Lisbon. We work in collaborative, multi-disciplinary delivery teams, developing digital products and services that answer user problems and support business goals.

Who we are looking for

We’re looking for people who want to become part of a global team that aims to put Springer Nature at the forefront of digital publishing.

• The work is interesting and meaningful.

• Our culture is collaborative and friendly.

• We encourage and support growth, both personal and professional.

This is a terrific opportunity for friendly, inquisitive people who want to get involved in our work, who love to learn, and who will embrace and develop our culture.

Having a good command of English is important; collaboration is important in our day-to-day work, so being able to communicate your ideas and understand others is key.

We are intentionally looking to create teams that are diverse and inclusive. Diversity is the mix of culture, background, experience and personality that we all bring; inclusion is getting the mix to work better together. We want every member of our teams to contribute to our common goals while respecting each other's skills, knowledge and needs. 

The role

Content Consumption is a domain within Springer Nature Digital that focuses on our user-facing products, helping to ensure that our researchers, authors and readers can efficiently and effectively find, read, and evaluate the information they need. The domain consists of several teams who manage our products and related services, with this position sitting within the team responsible for the display of journal content across our user-facing sites, including link.springer.com, nature.com and BioMedCentral.com. The remit of the team is to improve our core user journeys and help users discover the author services Springer Nature has to offer.

We’re looking for a Senior Frontend Developer to join a cross-functional delivery team composed of people with different backgrounds and experience levels. All team members collaborate to deliver solutions that best satisfy the needs of our business and we are working to create a culture that encourages new ideas and innovation but within the boundaries of the technologies that best suit the vision that Springer Nature has defined.

You should have extensive experience in all aspects of frontend development, having gained knowledge of a wide range of methodologies and technologies. You will be able to take responsibility for ensuring your product is accessible, performant, and robust, through the application of a comprehensive understanding of standards-based frontend technologies, focusing on the development of progressively enhanced solutions. Our primary focus is always the user, not the technology.

You should be comfortable working at scale on complex, long-lived systems (where robustness and maintainability take priority over the latest technology), providing incremental improvements to existing applications as well as designing and building new features - both within our Node.js applications and the browser via UI components. Experience in microservices architecture and working with design systems is a plus.

We have offices in London, Berlin, Lisbon, and Pune and routinely you will work remotely with colleagues across our different locations.

Please visit the SND homepage to learn more about who we are and what we do. To gain an understanding of frontend development and our approach to accessibility at Springer Nature, browse our Frontend Playbook.

What you’ll be doing

Within 3 months

• Get to know the rest of your team and start building a good working relationship with them.

• In product code contributions and discussions demonstrate understanding of, and harmony with, the constraints, goals, and strategy of frontend development at Springer Nature.

• Understand the architectural direction of frontend development at Springer Nature, and gain an understanding of how close to this way of working the different products within your domain sit.

• With guidance, contribute to meetings & discussions with other disciplines to gain an understanding of how we integrate & engage with the wider business.

• Spread knowledge of techniques outlined in frontend playbooks (e.g. progressive enhancement, accessibility, etc) in pairing and peer reviews.

• Build a relationship with your peers in the Frontend discipline, gaining insight into collaboration and technology across the business.

• Make your first tentative contribution towards our open-source frontend playbook.

• Get to know the Frontend Development Enablement team (who will provide you with expertise related to performance, accessibility, and architecture).

• Become familiar with the frontend component & design system.

• Work with your manager to identify and undertake training to improve yourself (accessibility, performance, etc).

Within 6 months

• Continue to develop relationships with a variety of teams around the business.

• Foster a wider understanding of our goals & technologies by demonstrating effective communication in meetings & discussions

• Contribute to technology discussions within your product area, helping to provide solutions promoting our development practises.

• Identify and complete tasks related to your areas of technical expertise, with minimal supervision.

• Continue contributing towards the frontend playbook.

• Be comfortable contributing domain-specific insights with the frontend leadership team to help solve cross-domain problems.

• Contribute to meetings & discussions with other disciplines and the wider business, being able to talk about the technological landscape within your domain.

• Contribute to Content Consumption specific playbooks and runbooks.

• Start to identify possible problems within your various domain-specific codebases, be able to describe and demonstrate those issues to the wider team, and then be able to propose solutions that conform with our preferred ways of working.

Within 12 months

• Continue to spread knowledge of, and implement, techniques outlined in frontend playbooks (e.g. progressive enhancement, accessibility) in contributions and/or code reviews.

• Work closely with people in Product, engaging at a very early stage in the product cycle, to help build robust products that align with the techniques in frontend playbooks.

• Continue to contribute to playbooks & runbooks specific to the Content Consumption domain.

• Demonstrate good knowledge of technology across the Content Consumption domain.

• Advocate and drive development practices that improve the user experience for Content Consumption products.

• You might find yourself with line-management responsibilities, but if not you will still be sought out for advice on solving problems by more junior developers from across the business. Will be able to give constructive criticism.

• Helping others to determine their learning needs, through casual chats or more formal methods. Helping other developers build the skills that enable them to deliver accessible, robust, performant, secure products.

• You should be helping to showcase best practices for frontend architecture within your domain.

• You should be identifying areas of the codebase within your domain where you can make improvements, in order to mitigate problems arising in the future.

• Contribute to discussions around complex solution design tradeoffs, referencing frontend architectural requirements, and enabling a wider understanding of user needs.

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At Springer Nature, we value the diversity of our teams and work to build an inclusive culture, where people are treated fairly and can bring their differences to work and thrive. We empower our colleagues and value their diverse perspectives as we strive to attract, nurture and develop the very best talent.

Springer Nature was awarded Diversity Team of the Year at the 2022 British Diversity Awards. Find out more about our DEI work here.

If you have any access needs related to disability, neurodivergence or a chronic condition, please contact us so we can make all necessary accommodation.