Technical Lead

Technical Lead at Mumsnet

We’re expanding our development team with an experienced Technical Lead.

We’re a close-knit team of like-minded developers who love the web and we are proud to be contributing to a successful, expanding business that is making a real difference in the lives of our users.

Reporting to the CTO, our ideal candidate will be curious, honest, eager to learn and be passionate about all aspects of technology.

TL;DR

We’re looking for someone who:

• Is an experienced technical lead
• Knows the TALL stack inside out (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire)
• Has an in-depth knowledge of Vue.js
• Has AWS and devops experience
• Understands the value of tests and clean code
• Is eager to learn and share knowledge with the rest of the team

We’re offering between £90k - £100k for the right person.

Development at Mumsnet

Our focus is to produce high quality, thoroughly tested code that helps the business to succeed and improves our users’ experience. 

We loosely follow agile methodologies, but our processes are flexible. The members of our team have a real influence on how we work. We’re always open to change and we collaboratively hone our processes to get better at what we do.

Our technology stack is Laravel 11, running on PHP 8.2 in production. We use Aurora RDS as our database engine, have Soketi running for web socket work, and DynamoDB for data collection. Redis is our caching layer.

We’re using Alpine JS on the front end and have both Livewire and VueJS components running in production. We’re also using SSR to enable functionality without impacting our SEO. We use Tailwind for styling.

We host on AWS, use Laravel Forge for server provisioning and Envoyer for deployment. Horizon manages our queues. We have ephemeral staging environments that can be spun up using GitHub chat ops using the Forge API. Locally we use Herd or Valet.

Our developers work with the tools that they’re most comfortable and productive with.

We’re invested in continued exposure to new technologies and actively encourage experimentation with new tools and ideas.

Working Environment

We offer a hybrid working environment with 2 weekly office days (currently Weds and Thurs) in Kentish Town

Our core hours are 9am - 5:30pm Monday - Friday with an hour lunch break but we’re more interested in output than presenteeism so if you need to move those hours around we can probably work it out.

The Role

As our Technical Lead, you’ll report directly to the CTO.

It’s an exciting time for engineering at Mumsnet. We’ve recently rebuilt our site from the ground up, moving from Rails and Java monoliths to a Laravel application.

We’re currently migrating our Livewire components to Vue.js, and building out exciting technical advancements using SSR and Vue.js. We’ve also built a completely new API and our long-term plan is to move our site to be an API client.

Our mobile applications are being completely rewritten using React Native, and we’re on schedule for a Q4 release.

What You’ll Be Doing

In addition to developing and supporting our new platform, you’ll be:

• Designing systems, writing code and managing releasing features into production.
• Working with our product team and CTO to assess requirements, features and designs to produce technical solutions.
• Peer reviewing and quality checking the code of other developers. We believe in crafting thoroughly tested, secure software, so all of our developers are involved in the code review process.
• Mentoring and helping other members of the team to solve problems through pair programming.
• Identifying, fixing and patching problems if they arise in production.
• Working with the CTO to manage our devops.
• Continuing to develop your coding abilities and skills.

All About You

We’re looking for someone who is passionate about software development and technology in general.

Ideally you will:

• Strive to constantly learn and improve your software engineering skills.
• Have a desire to write high-quality, simple code.
• Be intimately familiar with the TALL stack.
• Understand that maintenance, fixing bugs, refactoring, addressing technical debt, writings tests and technical documentation are as important as writing new code.
• Strive to delete more code than you add.
• Be a team player and get excited about our culture and software.
• Be a critical thinker who can diagnose problems and analyse situations to find a root cause and provide sustainable solutions.
• Have worked as a senior or lead software engineer before and have maintained software for multiple years.

You will also be comfortable taking briefs and specifications and challenging them to improve the resulting outcome. You’ll also be able to design that solution yourself and document the steps required to bring it to fruition.

Any experience with high traffic websites would be an advantage.

The Package

You’ll be provided with a Mac laptop. We also provide the tools that you need to do your job. Use PHPStorm? No problem. Want to use Herd? That’s cool too.

We also offer:

• A Laracasts account
• 25 days holiday per year plus bank holidays
• Buy More Holiday scheme
• Cycle2Work scheme
• Octopus Electric Vehicle scheme
• BUPA Private Medical and Dental cover
• A discretionary company bonus scheme
• Leisure and retail discount through our Perkbox platform
• A choice between unlimited online coaching sessions or ad hoc courses
• After 12 months employment, you will be eligible to join our EMI share options scheme

In addition to this, we’ll support you with:

• 1:1s with your line manager to review progress, agree goals and provide support.
• A yearly appraisal system.
• Bi-weekly DEAL sessions with a customised training programme agreed with your line manager.

We’re offering a salary between £90k - £100k for the right person.

Our Application Process

If you think you’re the right person and you’re excited by the opportunity to join us, apply with a CV and covering letter that demonstrates some of the qualities that we’re looking for.

If we think you’re the right fit we’ll schedule an initial call so that we can get to know you.

If it’s a match we’ll invite you to a pair programming session with us so that you can demonstrate your coding skills.

Who We Are

Mumsnet is the UK’s biggest website for parents and our mission is to make their lives easier.

We’ve got some of the busiest forums in Europe, with users offering each other advice and support 24/7, plus editorial content, reviews, campaigns and tools. We aim to be the UK’s go-to brand for parents, and - for our staff - a great place to work.

Why Work For Us

We focus on steady, sustainable growth, putting purpose (to make parent’s lives easier) before profit. We expect great performance, agility and collaboration in every role; cross-team working with talented, clever people is the best part of life at Mumsnet. Most importantly we’re looking for candidates with a growth mindset - we know everyone makes mistakes, the important thing is to learn from them and to share your learnings.

We embraced flexible and home working a long time before COVID, and we care much more about outputs than hours on the clock. We don't only want to hire the best people: we want to retain them. If you need some flexibility, let us know and we’ll do our best.

We’re committed to diversity and quality (see our policy ) and we think we’re second to none in the all-round support we offer to parents and carers at work (see our parental leave policies ). Working for Mumsnet means never having to pretend you don’t have a family or other commitments, and we promise never to keep you away from a school appointment. We are also proud to be a London Living Wage employer and we have never used unpaid interns.

We have a healthy line-up of sandwich lunches, knowledge sessions, book clubs, yoga sessions, monthly socials and sports teams, as well as an unhealthy line-up of staff parties at Kentish Town’s excellent pubs and restaurants, and McDonald’s deliveries for the mornings after.

Want To Know More?

Introducing Mumsnet: Our Culture - our guide to what it’s like to work at Mumsnet.

Read about our mission, our vision, our values and the behaviours that we expect of the people who work at Mumsnet.

View: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QnVaL-6ngQ6DsVHoGaIBicRhpSinP9k1WRXxfkzSofU