About Birchbox:

We started Birchbox in 2010 to redefine the way consumers discover and shop for beauty and grooming. The company quickly grew from an exciting idea to a business that has materially shaped the beauty industry: we've activated an enormous group of underserved, untapped consumers, awakening their relationship with beauty by making the experience relevant, easy and fun. Our innovation isn't the simple concept of delivering a box of samples - it's understanding that although not everyone is passionate about beauty and grooming, everyone still deserves to have a great experience finding, trying and buying it.
Birchbox operates in six countries, reaching more than 2.5 million active customers with a portfolio of 500 best-in-class prestige brand partners. We have retail locations within select Walgreens stores across the US as well as a flagship Birchbox store in Paris.

About the Job:

Birchbox is seeking resourceful and passionate Software Engineers (Frontend) to help build a web experience that is forever useful and always delightful.

As a frontend engineer, you will work closely with backend engineers, product designers, and other frontend engineers to build a web experience that sets a new bar for subscribing and shopping for beauty and grooming products online. 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 build robust internal tools used by teams like Customer Operations, Merchandising, and Web Production.

The frontend stack at Birchbox is always evolving. Some recent examples include converting the entire view layer to React and enabling our components’ styling to match the changing monthly box theme. 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.

About You

You know JavaScript like the back of your hand, and really dig all the improvements ES6 (and beyond) brings 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 such as React, Angular, Vue, etc.

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, CSS Modules, or CSS-in-JS solutions. You have fought in the Specificity Wars.

You have experience building for mobile, table, desktop, and everything in between. 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.

You’re aware of usability best practices and can advocate for them at every turn.

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 e-commerce.

Bonus Points

We’ll definitely want to have a conversation if:

• You’ve taken classes or majored in the computer science or computer engineering field.
• You’ve actively contributed to open source projects.
• You’re proficient with CSS animations.
• You have experience developing iOS and/or Android apps.
• You have experience building backend services, as well as frontend components.
• You’ve previously worked at startups and/or e-commerce companies.
• You believe useful frontend test suites are the coat of armor that keeps us sleeping at night after deployments.
• You’re committed to enabling DevOps culture with development, deployment, and observability / monitoring tooling.
• You’re passionate about idiomatic code style, readability, and when to use which software design patterns or libraries.

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.

Tech @ Birchbox

The technology team at Birchbox spans software engineering, technical operations, product, and business intelligence. We are responsible for developing the company’s customer-facing sites in six countries, managing hosted and cloud infrastructure, and closely supporting other teams (logistics, marketing, et al.) in our global company of over 200 people. Our service-oriented platform is built on a wide variety of open-source technologies: AWS, Apache Mesos, Marathon, and Docker; Salt, Jenkins, and Shippable for automation and CI/CD; Apache Spark and Hadoop ecosystem tools; Ruby on Rails, Java, Python, and PHP backing our React-based customer sites; Datadog, Kibana, and PagerDuty for observability and alerting. We rely on engineers to be self-motivated and quickly follow through on tasks without requiring close supervision. In return, engineers are given substantial freedom to use their own initiative and make their own decisions.

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 strive to revolutionize online retail.
• Using data, complex algorithms, and statistics to personalize the Birchbox experience for our customers, both offline and online.

As an engineer at Birchbox you:

• Are self-sufficient: you’ve learned how to navigate projects you’re unfamiliar with.
• Exercise wisdom: you’re able to identify opportunities to apply lessons learned, and do so with confidence and care.
• Take humble initiative: you’re always on the lookout to improve technology and processes, but understand how and when to best present this to your peers.
• Cultivate passion: not only do you continue to improve your craft, you share your discoveries with your colleagues.
• Are given empowering responsibility: you’re trusted with tools and processes to implement your vision, and you create this chance for others.
• Document kindly: your code and processes have documentation that will help those who come after you, regardless of skill level.
• Collaborate eagerly: you understand that helping others isn’t a distraction, but a vital part of what we do.