Job Specifications
Full-time
Contract Type: Permanent
Location: Home & Hub - London
Division: Technology & Product
Salary Currency: GBP Sterling
Department: Product
Company Description
Job Introduction
We are looking for experienced software engineers to join our Mantis product development team. This team is responsible for the design and development of our award-winning Mantis suite of contextual publishing and AdTech tools.
Who We Are
We're part of Reach plc, the UK's and Ireland's largest commercial news publisher. Every month, 48 million people come to us, via print and online, for news, entertainment and sport content they can trust.
Mantis is a suite of products developed within our Reach Solutions group which are used extensively across our own digital publications, and are also provided as B2B services used by other publishers and integrated with the wider commercial AdTech ecosystems.
At its core Mantis is a contextual analysis tool which uses ML/AI to provide an in-depth understanding of content created by journalists and others. Around this we have built a suite of products which are used for brand safety and contextual targeting; to provide readers with content recommendations, content search and personalisation; for content aggregation, content feeds and personalised newsletters. Yet more exciting products are in development and planned for the future.
What will you do?
You will be working in our Mantis product development team enhancing and improving our current systems and building the next generation of Mantis services and products.
You will be involved from initial design, through POC to full build, delivery and service management, working with internal stakeholders and external customer teams.
You will work closely with the Tech Leads and Product Owners ensuring that everything we build meets our high standards, is delivered to agreed timescales and that we're using the most appropriate technologies and development practices.
You will be designing solutions and writing application code (backend services, APIs and frontend components) and DevOps code to provision and manage the infrastructure it runs on. We use multiple cloud platforms to host our applications (including AWS and IBM Cloud), using the cloud services and, increasingly, serverless infrastructure.
As an experienced Senior Engineer you will also advise and help other less experienced team members and will review and approve code changes.
You will be flexible and keen to improve and expand your skills, learning about new programming languages, frameworks and platforms where necessary. One day you might be building a frontend UI for a dashboard or client component, the next you might be creating a new scalable SAAS API, creating a backend application service or researching how to create a new machine learning model for text, image or video analysis.
Who are we looking for?
We are looking for experienced software engineers to join our Mantis team.
Ideally, you'll have plenty of experience building scalable B2B and B2C products and services on cloud platforms and integrating these with customer's systems. You will be happy to work on your own initiative, while also playing an important role in ensuring the cohesion and success of the wider team.
We are looking for people who care deeply about the code they write, are enthusiastic about clean code principles and development best practices. You should also be able to bridge the gap between the technical and business stakeholders, understanding the commercial drivers and KPIs our products must meet.
Some of the technologies we currently use are listed below and we'd hope you have experience of many of them, but above all else we are looking for developers who can demonstrate a solid well-considered approach to software engineering and testing, and take pride in the work they do.
We Use
AWS and IBM Cloud for application services, Google Cloud for some data services
Typescript and JavaScript on the frontend and Node.js for backend services, plus other languages where appropriate
React, Next.js, Vue.js, micro-frontends via Webpack module federation
Serverless Lambda/Cloud Functions and AWS step function
Relational databases (e.g PostgreSQL, mySql)
Elastic Search
MongoDB
Apache Kafka & AWS Kinesis/DynamoDB event streams
ECS/Fargate compute services
LLM, RAG architecture
S3/Cloud Object Storage
IBM Watson Natural Language/Machine Learning services
Docker containers
CDN services (Akamai, Cloudfront)
Drone CI
AWS CDK and CloudFormation
Observability tools (log and service monitoring)
Unit and integration testing (Karma, Jest, Cypress)
How We'll Look After You
We take good care of our people - and that means more than just a pay packet. Whatever your role, you'll get a range of benefits, including:
25 days' holiday (plus bank holidays), as well as an extra day after you've been with us for three, five and 10 years. We also have a scheme to help you buy extra holiday if you want to.
An ext
About the Company
Reach is the UK’s and Ireland’s largest commercial news publisher. We’re home to over 120 trusted brands, from national titles like the Mirror, Express, Daily Record and Daily Star, to local brands like MyLondon, BelfastLive and the Manchester Evening News, as well as our US brands.
Every month, we reach 69% of the UK online population who come to us for trusted news, entertainment and sport.
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