Senior Front-end Software Engineer - Slides With Friends

Slides With Friends [https://slideswith.com] is a platform for interactive presentations, group education, live polls/quizzes, and team building — we make group experiences more engaging, educational, and fun.

Our small, all-remote team is looking to hire a full-time (contract) software engineer for 4-6 months to help our founder/CTO build product features and updates. Additional work after this is possible if the fit is excellent.

You’ll work directly with our technical co-founder to help build and release new features as well as to modernize, organize, and document our codebase over time. This is a central, hands-on role and you will be a core part of the team: you will develop features that will directly improve our customers lives and you will see immediate results from the things you build.

To do well in this position you should have years of experience writing clean and reliable code, shipping features regularly, and taking ownership of projects from start to finish. You will start by working with our current codebase (Vue2) to understand how our application works, how we like to do things, and where our priorities are — this is a role for someone who likes to code and ship prolifically and has the experience to do so well.

What we’re looking for

• You have 5+ years of hands-on experience building production software for the web

• You have a minimum of 2 years working with VueJS professionally

• You are easy to work with, flexible in coding style and methods, and have lots of experience working collaboratively with a team

• You want a role that is primarily code contribution (e.g. building and launching features)

• You have a strong grasp of HTML/CSS including grid, flexbox, use of preprocessors, and optimizing for browser compatibility and performance

• You have a visible track record of delivering products and feature to end-users

• You have excellent written and verbal English skills and communicate clearly

• You are experienced with modern best practices for automated testing, CI/CD, git, etc. and can help us improve where we need it

• You have experience organizing large projects for reliability, testability, performance, and upgradeability and you have opinions on how best to do these things

• You like to take ownership of projects and don’t need a lot of oversight or handholding

• You can understand the high-level goals goals of a project and are willing to compromise for business priorities when necessary

• You like to architect a project so it will be maintainable, testable, and extensible in the future. Thinking ahead is a key aspect of development for you

Extra credit

• You have a CS, engineering, or similar degree

• You have some experience with UX/Product Design (e.g. Figma)

• Experience with Apollo/GraphQL/WebSockets

• Experience with PostgreSQL, Hasura, or cloud systems (AWS)

• Experience with use of Cloudflare, Fastly, or CDN

• Experience with SVG or Canvas rendering/animation

Technology

We currently use the following tech:

• VueJs 2/Nuxt 2.7

• Hasura backed by PostgreSQL

• Apollo GraphQL over websockets

• Cypress E2E testing

In the future we will be moving to: Vue3/Nuxt3, Typescript, more E2E testing, Storybook

Why work with us:

• 100% remote and async team, we like working with talent wherever you are

• Work when and how you want - we care about results not your hours

• Your work will go directly into the hands of users and you’ll have a real impact

• Work directly with the founders and get firsthand experience building and growing a profitable bootstrapped SaaS company

• Focus on deliberate growth and speed, not burnout-level pressure. Our goal is to build wonderful products over time, not push our team to the edge.

• We value deep work and autonomy and have few meetings and minimal overhead. We are adults, and treat our employees like adults.

Things you might do:

• Build new interactive slide types to add to our slide deck builder

• Build a fast and light embeddable version of our interactive slides to use as live quizzes on a website

• Incorporate AI elements into select areas of our tool, like an AI interactive deck builder

• Architect and build a “single-player” or async mode for our presentations to help teachers and trainers assign quizzes

• Suggest architecture changes that would improve performance and reliability for end-users

• Update our GraphQL subscriptions, and relevant Postgres indices, to improve performance for groups of 1000+ simultaneous participants

• Help us migrate to Vue 3 and TypeScript, adding tests and improving the organization of our code along the way

• Diagnose WebSocket disconnect issues and create a resilient solution that keeps our users connected and reduces error rates

About us

Our founders live in Philadelphia, PA (USA, UTC-5) and the team works remotely in a variety of time zones. Slides With Friends was started during the pandemic to help distant groups stay connected and have fun remotely — and we are continuing with the mission of helping improve group experiences, social gatherings, and remote relationships. We want to bring software to the world that has a positive impact and brings people together.