Associate Frontend Engineer

Permanent/Full Time

Department: Engineering

Reports to: Engineering Manager

Salary: £28,850- £50,000

Closing Date: 04 December 2024

We are looking for a Frontend Engineer to join one of our talented, proactive and supportive Agile product teams to help us develop meaningful products for our clients. 

About Us 

AKQA Leap are digital product specialists within the AKQA Group network (WPP), with studios in London and Bristol.

We believe that quality is the fastest path to success. So whether we're launching, fixing or scaling a product, we get it right the first time. Some call it the magic touch. We call it quality at speed.

For over a decade, we’ve been designing, developing, and launching quality digital products for businesses like Google, Spotify and Vodafone.

People-focused. Curious. Always growing. These are just some of the values AKQA Leap upholds to cultivate an open, committed, and inclusive studio where you can be you. From the moment we meet, we’ll do our best to get to know you and understand what drives you. Our goal? To empower you to thrive and develop.

We aspire to push boundaries and craft purposeful products that people love. What truly matters is what you create, not where you create it - whether you feel in the flow working from home, or seek some company at our London or Bristol studios, we give you the freedom to work in a location and in the way that inspires you most.

To find out more about us visit https://www.akqa.com/leap/

About the Role

For this particular position, we are looking for someone to work long-term on a project for one of our large, well-known clients. You’ll be working closely with their engineers to deliver updates and new features to a prominent and high-traffic website. Due to the high-profile nature of the site, and the fact that you’ll be working with the client’s engineers, the team uses a bespoke set of tools and workflows on the project that you are unlikely to find elsewhere. The team is highly supportive and you will have the satisfaction of seeing your work go live and be used by millions of users on a regular basis.  

As an AKQA Leap Engineer, your main focus will be project work, working closely with designers, delivery leads, and product leads, and with guidance and mentoring from other members of the Engineering team. 

You will join one of our friendly, supportive, proactive Agile product teams. Our teams are self-organising, with the freedom to define their own ways of working.

At AKQA Leap we’re not married to any one frontend framework. We’ve recently deployed projects using Vue.js, Angular with NgRx, and our own p.ota.to was rebuilt as an isomorphic React app. Of course, we also regularly get stuck in with POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) and CSS/Sass with some vanilla JavaScript to go with it. We aim to strike a balance between leveraging our existing strengths and exploring new tech. While this listing focuses on JavaScript, we try to avoid silos: our developers are encouraged to contribute to any part of a system they’d like to.

Accountabilities

• Write clean, easy-to-read, and maintainable code that adheres to best practices.
• Develop creative solutions to technical problems and user needs while identifying opportunities to optimise and simplify software.
• Balance the trade-offs between achieving perfection and meeting delivery deadlines effectively.
• Work collaboratively within a friendly, self-organising, cross-functional Agile product team.
• Provide support and guidance to other Engineers within the team, fostering a culture of collaboration and growth.
• Collaborate closely with Designers, Product Leads, and other disciplines to ensure cohesive and effective product development.
• Partner regularly with multiple clients to deliver high-quality solutions.

About You

We’re looking for someone who writes great code, but also enjoys collaborating with other disciplines in the product team to devise creative solutions to the users’ needs. For this role, you should have an appreciation of the full web stack, as well as an appreciation of current trends in both backend and frontend web technologies. Experience with modern web frameworks is a plus, but not mandatory.

You Should Have

• Experience building for the web using frontend technologies: semantic HTML, CSS and SASS, and some JavaScript.
• Experience using modern development tools (e.g. Git, GitLab or GitHub etc.) 
• Excellent teamwork, and written and verbal communication skills

Ideally Also

• Experience with modern JavaScript frameworks (e.g. React, Vue.js etc.)
• Knowledge of CSS preprocessors (SASS, PostCSS, etc.)
• A basic understanding of security vulnerabilities and how to prevent them
• Experience building for performance and accessibility
• Backend server or native app development skills
• Experience using Python would be a bonus
• Knowledge of testing, QA tools and methodologies
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban
• Interest in building Progressive Web Apps or offline experiences

We know that no candidate will be the exact match for all we’ve listed, so we would encourage you to apply if you feel you might be close but not a perfect match for all of the role’s requirements. 

What We Offer

We work hard to be a great employer - a place where our people are proud to work. In the past, we were officially recognised as a Best Company to Work For, and named among the Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For.

Here are some of the benefits we offer: 

• Flexi leave (within reason), plus Birthday Off
• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay
• Paid Parental Bereavement leave
• Volunteering Days
• Flexible benefits package (cash sum per month)
• Private medical and dental insurance
• Enhanced competitive pension scheme
• Annual learning budget
• A financial contribution to a tech purchase 
• Mental Health and Wellbeing Support
• Employee Assistance Programmes
• Occupational Sick Pay
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection Assurance

What Happens Next

If this role and AKQA Leap sounds like a good fit please apply and someone from our People Team will be in touch shortly.  

Inclusivity

We want to make our hiring as inclusive as possible; this job description has been reviewed by a range of employees and has passed a neutral language check. We have also reviewed our hiring process to make sure it offers flexibility to candidates who need it.

We welcome you to inform us confidentially at peopleteam@akqaleap.com if you require any accommodations to be able to fully participate in our recruitment process. 

We're trying to do better and would love your feedback. If you think there's anything we could improve or places you think we should advertise, then please let us know.

Location: Our office is based in London and we anticipate this role to be hybrid with a mixture of remote and office-based work.