Frontend Engineer

Balena is a highly distributed company that has embraced a remote-first approach since 2013. We are a group of individuals from across the globe working together to achieve our mission: “reduce friction for fleet owners and unlock the power of physical computing”. For us, this means removing the barriers to entry for developing IoT products, whether that’s easing software deployments with balenaCloud, simplifying image flashing with balenaEtcher, or offering our own hardware based on our experience seeing thousands of devices running in production environments. We’re engineering a complete, end-to-end solution that makes it easy for any developer to build applications at the Edge.

• We place trust and autonomy in our team to own the outcome of their work.
• We practice radical candor and transparency with open, honest, and clear communications.
• We embrace first-principles thinking and constantly challenge our assumptions.
• We organize ourselves based on the best use of our collective abilities to solve our highest priority problems at any given time, rather than by a strict hierarchy.
• We’re not afraid to fail as long as we learn from our mistakes.
• We’re always looking for common patterns that allow us to reduce complexity.
• We embrace short term pain for long term gain, building products that will stand the test of time.

At balena we are committed to building user interfaces that reflect our data-driven architecture. Changes to our data model should not require weeks of work to be reflected in our UI. Updates should happen instantly and automatically, whilst maintaining an intuitive and highly functional user experience.

As a Frontend Engineer joining the team, your first weeks will be spent absorbing context and understanding how we work. You will be asking questions, reading code and documentation, picking up issues, and researching any new technologies you come across. You will work on continuously improving your understanding of our interdependent systems, and collaborate with other engineers to build and maintain user interfaces for our products and internal tools.

As you grow in the role, the projects you work on will get more complex, the architectural challenges harder, and your decisions will have a higher impact. You will be empowered to identify improvements across the stack, communicate proposals, implement solutions, and help steer the future of balena. You will be building not only robust front-ends but also successful products for our users!

• Work closely with designers and contribute ideas for UI/UX improvements
• Leverage data model definitions to automatically generate user interfaces
• Own projects from concept and architecture to development and maintenance
• Identify recurring patterns in product feedback and use that to drive change
• Participate in support to get to the root of user friction and ideate long-term solutions
• Contribute to documentation and user-facing guides for your implementations
• Share your expertise with peers on support, be a mentor, and educate others
• Invest back in our technologies, libraries, and frameworks

Requirements

• Strong engineering skills and passion for delivering delightful user experiences
• Experience building large single-page apps with React, or similar UI frameworks
• Ability to write production-ready code in Node.js and debug complex issues
• Understanding of backend systems and how they interact with front-end apps
• Knowledge of modern engineering practices, such as optimizing for usability, modularity, performance, and scalability
• Ability to manage ambiguity and independently make critical trade-off decisions
• Continuous improvement mindset and desire to make yourself and others more effective
• Excellent communication skills and fluency in English

• Experience building automation tools
• Familiarity with productivity software
• Background in leading projects and working across functions to build great products
• Experience with IoT, embedded SW, or balena as a user/contributor
• Contributions to OSS projects and community involvement

Make sure to let us know if any of these items apply to you! If possible, please also share a sample of your work or examples of projects (URL or attachment).

Benefits

• Work with a talented and globally distributed team
• Equipment of your choice
• Remote-friendly
• Flexible working hours
• Flexible vacation policy
• Annual company gathering in an international location
• We send you hardware for side projects!