About the Job

Birchbox is looking for experienced Software Engineers that are obsessed with delivering the best possible customer experience, value software engineering best practices, and never forget about scalability and performance when designing code. As a Frontend Engineer, you will work closely with Backend Engineers, Product Designers, and other Frontend Engineers to build and maintain a web experience that is forever useful and always delightful.

When adding features and fixing bugs, you will make sure the Birchbox website works great on modern browsers, on devices of varying size, and in all the locales in which Birchbox currently operates. You will also help develop and maintain internal CMSs and other tooling used by teams like Customer Operations, Merchandising, and Web Production.

The frontend stack at Birchbox is always evolving. For example, we recently converted the entire view layer of the web experience to React. You will contribute performant and well-documented code to our growing library of reusable components. You will contribute ideas and utilities for enhancing the frontend development experience, shaping the future of the codebase.

At Birchbox you will...

• Take your ideas to the next level right away. We experiment, iterate, learn, and repeat.
• Build things people love. Our goal is to surprise and delight our customers as much as possible. Great design, simple user experience, and access to data to make smart decision help us to achieve it.
  
• Collaborate, with purpose. You’ll work in small groups with other talented thinkers and figure out how to make Birchbox’s software even better.
  
• Work with people who care. We’re a group of talented professionals who pride ourselves on what we do. We’re smart, innovative, energetic, and lots of fun.

About you...

• You know JavaScript like the back of your hand, and really dig all the improvements ES6 has brought to the developer experience.
• While writing vanilla JS may give you mad nerd cred, you understand that at a certain point one must stand on the shoulders of giants. You have experience using JS frameworks and libraries, including at least one year of experience using React.
• Even though you may not write HTML by hand much these days, you have a working knowledge of the DOM and have encountered terms like ‘render tree’, ‘painting’ and ‘event loop’.
• You have strong CSS skills and have gone beyond the basics by using tools like LESS, SASS, PostCSS, and/or CSS Modules. You have fought in the Specificity Wars
• You have experience building web interfaces that work great on devices of varying size and input methods. Whether it’s responsive, adaptive, fluid, or whatever the next buzz word is — you know how to write components that embrace the mercurial nature of the web platform.
• While your true love is the frontend, you know you can’t treat the other parts of the stack as black boxes. You have some working knowledge of backend languages such as Ruby, PHP or Python.
• At the end of the day, you enjoy creating useful and delightful experiences in a high quality product that real people will love. You have exceptional taste, an eye for detail, a passion for usability, and an interest in ecommerce.
• Bonus Points:
  • You’ve taken classes or majored in the computer science or computer engineering field.
  • You’ve worked at startups and/or e-commerce companies.
  • You’ve contributed (even in a small way) to open source projects.
  • You’ve engaged in measuring and improving the render performance of web pages.
  • You’re proficient with CSS animations.
  • You have experience developing iOS and/or Android apps.
  • You’ve actually worked on backend services. Extra Bonus: At least one of those services was built with Ruby on Rails.

Tech @ Birchbox

The technology team at Birchbox spans software engineering, technical operations, product, and data science. We are responsible for developing the company's customer-facing sites in all six countries, managing hosted and cloud infrastructure, and closely supporting other teams (logistics, marketing, et al.) in our 230+-person global company. Our microservices platform is built on a wide variety of open-source technologies: Apache Mesos, Marathon, and Docker; Salt and Jenkins for automation and CI/CD; Apache Spark and Hadoop ecosystem tools; Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP, and Scala backing our React-based customer sites. The size of our team and the breadth of its responsibilities means we rely on our engineers to be self-motivated and quickly follow through on tasks without requiring close supervision. In return our engineers are given leeway to use their own initiative.

Our challenges include:

• Evolving our software and systems architecture to support a rapidly growing customer base across multiple countries and languages.
  
• Designing and implementing the best user experience for our customers; We are striving to revolutionize online retail.
  
• Using data, complex algorithms, and statistics, to personalize the Birchbox experience for our customers, both offline and online.