Junior Full-Stack JavaScript Engineer

We're looking for a great junior software engineer who can help us to design and build our world-class product for modern charities.

At Beacon we’re a growing technology startup building the best nonprofit-focused CRM in the world. We passionately believe in the power of technology to make a difference.

Chris and David, both software engineers, founded Beacon in 2017 to build a new kind of charity CRM using the latest technology and design principles.

Now hundreds of innovative charities around the world trust Beacon to run their core technology infrastructure. Animal welfare, human rights, disaster relief, cancer support - all powered by Beacon. You can see a quick demo of our product, here.

We have doing good at the core of our mission, but we're also profitable, privately owned, and our goals are for long term sustainable growth - not making a quick buck for venture capitalists.

At Beacon we take building exceptional software very seriously. In a recent survey by Fundraising magazine we were rated 4.9/5 on functionality and 5/5 on ease of use - we want to keep it that way!

Our technology stack is built around JavaScript running on AWS. The front-end web app is built with React, making extensive use of Material UI. Beacon's back-end infrastructure is in Node.js, based around microservices running on AWS Lambda. All new endpoints are written using GraphQL, and we're big advocates. Our database infrastructure is a combination of Postgres and Google BigQuery. We're on a journey to introduce more TypeScript into our stack wherever appropriate! 

Responsibilities

Your focus will be building and maintaining the entire Beacon product, from infrastructure to interface. You'll work directly with the founders and our existing engineering team to design, develop, and maintain a sophisticated and modern web application.

You will:

• Design and implement improvements to the core of the Beacon product
• Write clean, maintainable code to deliver on the Beacon product roadmap
• Identify and fix bugs in the existing system
• Take ownership of features from UI/UX design to building the backend endpoints that you need
• Work closely with other engineers to come up with creative and innovative solutions to challenging technical problems

Requirements

You’ll have relevant experience with - and a passion for - using JavaScript to build beautiful web applications and the infrastructure that supports them. You'll love trying out new ways of doing things.

You'll need practical experience with the following technologies:

• React
• Node
• SQL Databases

And there are bonus points for these:

• Material UI
• Writing tests with Jest and Playwright
• TypeScript
• GraphQL
• AWS Lambda
• Postgres
• Google BigQuery
• SQS (or other queueing architecture. We love queues!)

We make extensive use of libraries to make our lives easier including Lodash, Sequelize, Mout, Moment, and loads of others. Libraries are for winners.

Benefits

• Our customers are all charities - you'll get to build your career whilst having a genuinely positive impact on the world
• Four day work week. Our working model gives everyone a 3 day weekend, every week.
• We'll give you 6 weeks (24 days) of holiday every year, plus bank holidays
• Taking time off is important. And we really mean it: We'll pay you a £60 bonus for every day of holiday you take
• Banded salary system so that everyone is paid the same for doing the same job, and compensation growth within the organisation is clear.
• Guaranteed pay rise to adjust for market changes every 12 months
• Beacon is climate positive (beyond carbon neutral), so your employment won't hurt the planet. Learn more
• A proper pension - we'll match 150% of your pension contributions (up to 10%)
• Private health insurance with routine dental & optical cover
• Modern parental leave policy (12 weeks at full pay, and it's the same for everyone, regardless of gender or circumstances)
• Cycle to work scheme

Working together

As a team we prefer to be together in our office (4-6 New Inn Broadway, London, EC2A 3PR) and we'd want you to join us - so this is not a remote role. We offer flexible working hours and while your usual place of work will be with us in the office, you can work home when you need to.

We passionately believe in doing our part to address the tech sector's diversity problem

We believe that in building diversity we build strength.

We encourage everyone with the required skills to apply, we consider building a diverse and representative team to be critical to our success, and we actively pursue building a more diverse team.

We have a banded salary system to ensure that nobody is paid differently for the same role. Salaries across the organisation, including executive pay, are entirely transparent.

Our parental leave policy provides for 12 weeks of full pay, and can be taken by any parent, regardless of their new parenting circumstances.

We are actively working to demonstrate our commitment to our values by working towards Bloody Good Period’s ‘Bloody Good Employer’ certification and towards becoming a certified BCorp.