MongoDB/Node.js/Express/EJS Full Stack
Developer $120,000
Technical Requirements:
Linux or macOS Git/Github MongoDB 6.0 Node.js 23 Memcached Express.js Passport.js ECMAScript 2018 Gulp.js SASS Bootstrap CSS Rendering Engine: EJS AWS Cloud Services: Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, Cloudfront, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, SES, S3
We have an immediate need for a creative, curious, mature, and enthusiastic full-stack developer, for business-critical work on an established and growing CMS business. We are Alaska-based Viking CMS, a one-man shop at this time, serving customers in Oklahoma.
The technical requirements are not negotiable. However, if one or two items are missing from that list, I want to hear from you if you strongly resonate with the personal qualities below.
About You
You are in the United States or Canada and speak fluent English. You are college educated, and may be formally trained in computer science, or you may be self-taught. You probably have 10-15 years of experience. You’ve probably worked for large companies and grew weary of politics, tedium, and inefficiency. You’ve worked freelance, but want something reliable and full-time. You enjoy client-side work as much as server-side work. You do not see one as “better” or more important than the other, you see how they work together. You enjoy writing HTML and CSS. You are not overly attached to any JS framework. You enjoy contributing new visual design ideas, UX improvements, and new data structures. You are stable and mature, and your greatest desire is to create a lifestyle for yourself where you can enjoy the freedom and autonomy of working remotely, while pursuing your passion of solving problems with code and helping your customer achieve their business goals. You have your own
personal projects on the side. You do not give up easily. You are a problem solver, and a hard worker, but you know you deserve leisure and play, and aren’t ashamed to enjoy it.
About Us
Over the last 8 years, starting as an employee (front-end) of the company that is now my customer, I built a “headless, self-referencing” Content Management Service to fill needs that were not being met by any other CMS in the enterprise-scale market. When I say enterprise scale, I mean that we have two TV stations, five radio stations, digital billboards and television broadcast content all beginning in our database, or microservices, as well as providing content to four third-party mobile apps. We are the sole managers of 30 years of content: terabytes of stories, images, and videos. Typically our websites have 2-8K concurrent public users, and the customer has 100 or so institutional, authenticated users, who create the content, to give you a sense of scale. The focus has always been two things 1) the product and 2) the relationship with the customer. We do not have a “silicon valley” or “venture capital” mindset. It’s a “bespoke” shop. Our greatest ambition is to serve the customers’ needs, create a robust, readable, and maintainable codebase, and create financial security and freedom for ourselves. In our case that has meant working remotely from Alaska for the last 5 years, often on our sailboat. This has been wildly successful and exhilarating.
The only problem is I am just one guy, and there is too much institutional risk for my customer to put their entire organization in the hands of one guy. They ask me “what do we do if you get run over by a moose or sink your boat and drown?”, and it is a funny yet very serious question. Their desire is that I bring on a developer that works together with me as an equal peer, and my addition to that is that I also bring on an additional customer for that developer to primarily serve once that person is fully capable. This way we both have redundancy, an appropriate workload and generous compensation, and we can also take breaks from our respective customers, knowing they are still being served fully. We have already budgeted for your compensation, even without a new customer, so nothing is contingent on the “new customer”. The product was built from day one to expand to more affiliates, and more station groups. This moment has been well planned for, and the moment has arrived.
You’ll notice I’m focused on the personal qualities of the candidate, not just the technical requirements. My need is for a co-equal, with confidence, passion, curiosity, and humility. I need somebody who wants to feel empowered and respected, and has the courage, authenticity, and self-responsibility to deserve it. I will be able to give you your own customer, that is your primary responsibility, and I want to feel the safety and peace of mind that your customer is being served without my intervention. I need you to have the confidence to deliver to your customer what they need, which may be different from what they asked for, as well as the humility to admit when you got it wrong. Trust is built by accountability, and you are accountable to your customer first. You will have freedom and autonomy, and with that you will have responsibility. I use a lot of emotional words to describe this person, because the emotional skills are as important as the
technical skills. You will eventually be interacting directly with your customer contact, hearing directly from them about their feelings, needs, concerns, ideas, gripes and complaints. There is no “filter” between your customer contact point and yourself, no product manager, no customer service agent, no salespeople, no help desk. The most important qualities of that relationship will be connection, empathy, honesty, reliability, and integrity.
The Job
1. I will train you to serve my current customer, starting immediately with a full redesign of their current HTML views, as an entry point to the codebase and as a dry-run for creating a new affiliate.
2. Once you are competent and comfortable, we will bring on a new customer of similar scale and you will be in the driver’s seat. You will generate their new web presence on our CMS architecture, according to their needs. Your compensation will go up accordingly with that new contract.
3. This is a 1099 position, not W-2. You don’t have hours as much as you have personal responsibilities and some hard deadlines. You provide your own equipment. There is no office to come into.
Please email your resume to: Don don.vikingcms@gmail.com and Briana bclifton@gwmail.gwu.edu (my wife is helping me with the job posting and resume collection)