Upwork ($UPWK) is the world's largest freelancing website. Each year $1.7 billion of work happens through Upwork, allowing businesses to get more done and helping professionals break free of traditional time and place boundaries and work anytime, anywhere on projects they love. At Upwork, you'll help build on this momentum. Together, we'll create economic and social value on a global scale, providing a trusted online workplace for businesses to connect with extraordinary talent and work without limits.
Are you a software architect who is passionate about designing and building a highly performant, robust framework for developers to create amazing user experiences on and helping impact the professional lives of millions of freelancers and clients around the world? Do you relish solving challenging problems? Do you enjoy identifying potential scalability issues, implementing engineering standard methodologies, and coming up with creative solutions to both technical and organizational challenges? If so, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re looking for an extraordinary Front end Architect to drive the design and evolve our front end platform for all our web applications across the company. As the Front End Architect, you will work with our platform and application engineering teams, spanning key domains (Search, Visitor Site, Job Applications, Messaging, Time Tracking, & Monetization are just a few of them) to develop the front end stack for building these applications. You need to have a consistent track record of delivering highly performant web applications.
Your responsibilities
- Define the vision and strategy to develop our frontend platform for application teams.
- Work closely with backend, applications and design teams to design and evolve our frontend platform, core platform features, and reusable components.
- Collaborate with feature and component teams during both design and development phases to ensure adherence to UI architectural standards and best practices.
- Define and drive adoption of design patterns, coding and quality standards and software development processes.
- Drive a culture of quality, technical curiosity, continuous improvement, and data-driven decision-making.
- Act in a technical leadership capacity: Identify new and emerging technologies for adoption; Mentor junior engineers, new team members, perform code reviews and applying technical expertise to challenging programming and design problems.
- Champion and lead key multi-functional initiatives. Provide technical guidance and coaching to engineers to continuously improve design quality.
What it takes to catch our eye:
- 10+ years of software development experience.
- 7+ years hands-on experience with cutting web technologies (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript), application servers and tooling (npm, Webpack, Jenkins, GraphQL, etc.)
- 3+ years of hands-on experience building applications on Node.js.
- Experience creating a front end testing infrastructure and CI workflow
- Excellent written and verbal interpersonal skills. Our teams are widely distributed, and you will be required to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences across different cultures.
- Ability to serve as a technical lead of multiple software development teams, if required.
- Polished communication skills and track record advocating for compelling product design and the underpinning methodologies that deliver great design.
- Ability to practice in a fast-moving, data-driven, collaborative environment that has a bias towards delivery and MVP approaches.
- Desire to roll up the sleeves and write code for critical company projects.
How to really knock our socks off:
- You don’t need to rely on any frameworks, like Vue or React, because you can build one from scratch.
- You have built many responsive sites, but also created adaptive components or pages, when needed. You have built sites that met WCAG requirements.
- Strong focus on the customer and the business, coupled with a burning desire to learn, respond to feedback and grow. We’re looking for people who thrive on learning new technologies and don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions.
Come change how the world works.
At Upwork you’ll help shape the future of work. From our offices in San Francisco, Mountain View and Chicago, together we’re creating exciting new opportunities for a world of professionals. You’ll be part of a vibrant culture built on shared values: Inspire a boundless future of work, Put our community first, Have a bias towards action, and Build amazing teams. Along the way you’ll have fun and enjoy the perks of a people-first company: Work from Home Wednesday's, daily breakfast and lunch, regular in-office happy hours, top-notch benefits … and more. Check out Upwork’s spotlight on The Muse for a glimpse of our daily work/life balance.
Upwork is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.