The Company
Upstatement is a creative digital studio with expertise in editorial products. We build experiences for the future of publishing, art, higher ed, cooking, medicine, marketing, and more. Much of our work tends to have an editorial focus: we’ve built award-winning websites for clients including MIT, Harvard, Tito’s Vodka, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, PGA Tour, Yale, Bloomberg, Penguin Random House, and PBS NewsHour.
Our strength is in our people and our process—we believe that strategy, design, and tech are all connected, and the way we work reflects that. Designers write code, producers are fluent in InDesign, and engineers participate in strategy workshops. Teams here are small, self-directed, and dedicated to one client at a time. You'll find a healthy mix of autonomous decision-making and collaborative teamwork.
The organization is flat and practices the mantra that good ideas come from everywhere. We believe in setting up each person for success and growth. Upstatement invests heavily in finding talented, thoughtful people; those that come here tend to stay.
The Role
Join us at the forefront of sophisticated architecture, tool creation, process definition, and team communication. We’re looking for a driven engineer with well-rounded experience to lead the creation of remarkable digital products.
Research and Solutions Architecture: Engineers participate in web projects from day one: sitting in on stakeholder interviews, checking out existing codebases, and getting to know the client’s tech team. Once we have a handle on the problem space we evaluate possible technology solutions. We’re not dogmatic about any particular framework; no two clients or projects are the same, and no one technology can solve all problems effectively.
Collaboration: Engineers work as part of small multi-disciplinary teams. Designers, producers, and developers work together every day of the project from strategy presentations through to final browser bug fixing. We kick off each day with a daily standup and check in frequently via Slack, Trello, and Github. We also keep up lightweight communication via Slack with clients—engineers at Upstatement are client-facing, so you won’t be playing telephone with account managers.
Crafting Code: We’re committed to writing modern, performant, maintainable code. This means staying abreast of best practices, reviewing each other’s PR’s, and writing unit and acceptance tests when necessary. The bulk of our code tends to be PHP and JavaScript, but we’re not married to those languages or any associated tooling. Technologies we’ve deployed into production in the past year include WordPress, Craft CMS, Contentful, Prismic, Magento, React, Vue, Gatsby, and Elasticsearch.
Leadership: As Lead Engineer, you'll mentor less-experienced team members and guide them on projects towards becoming amazing leaders in their own right. You’ll also have the opportunity to contribute to long-term internal projects and define best practices across the department (in the past two months we’ve had company-wide shares on GDPR, git-iquette, performance testing, and SEO).
About You
Professional experience in a similar role
Fluency with one or more server-side languages
Dominant framework/CMS familiarity
Modern client-side skills
Intimate knowledge of web performance and security
Working knowledge of common testing tools and methodologies
Familiarity with accessibility standards and best practices
Communicative, thoughtful, optimistic, and collaborative
Bonus Points
Working familiarity with Scrum/Agile methodologies
Data visualization skills
Native app development