Hoefler & Frere-Jones: Web Software Engineer

Location: New York, NY
URL: http://www.typography.com

Named one of most innovative design companies in America by Fast Company, Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ) is a leading digital type foundry with a body of work that includes some of the world’s most famous fonts. H&FJ works with brand leaders in every sector, developing original fonts for print, screen, and mobile applications, and licensing them through our New York office and our website at www.typography.com. Our collection includes the signature typeface of the Obama campaign, the fonts used by magazines from Wired to Martha Stewart Living, the institutional typefaces of the Whitney and Guggenheim museums, and the Hoefler Text font family that has shipped with 75 million Macintoshes. A leader in the industry for more than 20 years, H&FJ’s mission is to enable people to speak in a unique voice across all channels, always with an emphasis on new and emerging technologies. It’s an objective that’s led us to create new products and services that bring fine typography to websites, mobile apps, eBooks, and beyond. 

H&FJ is looking for talented and clear-thinking programmers to help us develop our next generation of web applications.

As a company that develops font software, H&FJ serves two constituencies: the niche market of graphic designers who buy our fonts, and the boundless audience of people who experience our fonts on screen. Working with us will give you a chance to design tight, scalable, reliable, and secure solutions, to deploy them to one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms, and to see them experienced billions of times a day. If you’re someone who’s both self-motivated and collaborative, eager to work with a small and passionate team (at a company that both understands and values solid engineering), and is ready to build public-facing tools that have a genuine impact on how the world communicates, read on.

We’re looking for someone with significant experience in a LAMP environment, who’s fluent in PHP and MySQL. You should have a solid understanding of front-end conditions, too: know HTML and CSS, best practices for JavaScript and AJAX, and coding across browsers. You should understand web optimization, have work experience with multiple web frameworks, and have developed for Amazon Web Services. Python is a plus, but not a requirement.

This is a full-time salaried position at our New York office, open to US citizens or those with authorization to work in the US.

Key Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the design, development, and evolution of H&FJ’s web properties and application

• Work collaboratively with developers and UX designers to help shape solutions that integrate new capabilities and technologies that support the company’s goals

• Make recommendations directly to the CTO for refining existing services and creating new ones, in order to address changes in standards, customer expectations, behavior patterns, and best practices

• Identify and evaluate appropriate front end frameworks and back end technologies suitable for the delivery of new products and services

• Follow processes and standards for project development and quality assurance, to ensure that projects are completed in a timely and acceptable manner

• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of standards, emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent

• 4+ years of industry experience developing with current versions of PHP and MySQL (in a LAMP environment), JavaScript and AJAX, to build web applications that support relational databases
• Experience authoring fast-rendering reusable components using PHP, Python, jQuery, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS

• Experience with processing distributable problems, using paradigms such as MapReduce and frameworks such as Hadoop

• Experience developing secure web applications, integrating third-party services, and CDN deployment

• Experience writing maintainable code with thorough test coverage, using source control, and dev/stage/prod release workflow

• Previous work experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

To apply: Please send a letter and résumé to Greg Tyree at hr-programmer@typography.com. You’re welcome to include any other material that you feel distinguishes you as a candidate.