MongoDB/Node.js/Express/EJS Full Stack Developer
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Overview
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. You will 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)