Senior Software Engineer

at  Sporting News

HIRING PROCESS.

• Application and CV review
• 1st stage 30-minute technical screening call
• “Face-to-face” 90-minute interview via Google Meet, with a short exercise

ABOUT YOUR NEW ROLE

The Sporting News is growing fast internationally and is searching for a Senior Software Engineer with DevOps experience to help develop our digital platforms. Sporting News, a sports media publication that originated in the United States in 1886, already has editions in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan. We’re excited to expand our international footprint.
You will have the opportunity to work across a variety of technologies and will need to be comfortable doing so. We don’t limit ourselves as a company to a fixed set of technologies and we expect all of our engineers to be keen on learning new skills so that we can use the right tool for the job.

Our existing technical stack includes the following:

• Python with Django, Django Ninja
• AWS with ECS, ECR, RDS (PostgreSQL), SQS, SNS, Lambda, S3
• Terraform
• GitHub + Actions
• Cloudflare

We’ve recently rolled out a new frontend platform for our website, handling the publishing data pipeline and serving the content to our multiple global editions. We’re also currently exploring technologies for mobile applications that we have planned for later next year. It’s an exciting time to be joining our engineering team, and to be involved in these early discussions.
Our engineering team needs to be empowered to iteratively and rapidly deliver changes all the way through to production. To do this we combine our extensive cloud automation knowledge with a DevOps culture.
We ensure that we document our architecture and infrastructure as code, using technologies such as Terraform. Containerisation is a big part of empowering our teams to develop, deploy and scale their applications, but so too is using a PaaS or AWS Lambda and avoiding the complexity of stateful services altogether. Remember, we like to use the right tool for the job.
For us, DevOps is about culture rather than roles and titles. We prefer that our Engineers can help build the infrastructure that their applications run, with the mantra; you build it, you run it. We don’t throw work “over the wall” for other teams to deal with. We believe teams that develop the work, with their domain knowledge, are best placed to also run and maintain their work. This also helps to avoid knowledge silos.
We grow a team of polyglot programmers, which you might already consider yourself to be, who are versed in a mix of paradigms such as OO and/or event-based programming. You will need to be comfortable sharing your knowledge and skills with others. We’d love to hear of any examples of mentoring, coaching, and growing team members. Maybe you have written some blog posts about your discipline, or perhaps even delivered a talk or two.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Work with the CTO and Technical Leads to design technical architecture for new and existing functionality of the website, and future products, such as mobile applications
• Design, test, implement, support and maintain new functionality and products to best technical practices and standards
• Collaborate with development teams overseas
• Work to help optimise the website and platforms, in terms of technical elements such as caching, speed, and performance of code, as well as cost savings with cloud infrastructure and service integrations that we use
• Take part in agile ceremonies to help plan and estimate future work to help prioritise and scope our product roadmap, as well as discuss and suggest improvements so that our team can continuously improve
• Be involved in interviews for hiring additional engineers to our team
• On call work is a requirement for this role