Job Description
Inquirium is looking for a freelance developer to build front-end features for both new and established educational web apps that help students to read, annotate, and analyze online texts, and help teachers to evaluate student work. These apps are developed through long-term collaborations with our clients and are based on ground-breaking research on literacy and evaluation. Our mission is to help schools improve their instruction and evaluation through cutting edge technologies and instructional practices.
We are hiring a front-end developer who can join a multifaceted team, including an interaction designer, a visual designer, a back-end developer, and other front-end developers to implement tools and interfaces that foster student interaction and help teachers author and evaluate instructional units. This position is primarily focused on front-end work, with some collaboration with a back-end developer to design APIs for saving and retrieving student data.
The initial commitment is a half-time position through the end of 2019, with potential to increase in 2020 and beyond, including potential work on other Inquirium projects.
We’re interested in establishing relationships with individual developers and will not respond to companies offering us software services.
Sample Tasks
If you had been on our team this past week, you might have helped build out a custom WYSIWYG authoring tool for teachers to design their own curricula around complex readings, including custom features such as background links and vocabulary definitions. On another project, you might have done some rapid prototyping to test out interaction models for selecting and annotating online texts, while building a front-end UI for elementary students to create notecards and margin notes as part of an annotation task.
Skills & Requirements
Here’s who we’re looking for:
You enjoy iterative design and working in small teams. At the same time, you can work independently, stay on schedule, and you don’t need a lot of hand holding to get the job done.
You’re comfortable working with modern Javascript (ES6), frameworks like React and Material UI, and with tooling like Gulp and Webpack. You’ve built web interactives before, whether as one-offs on a page, or as full-blown single-page applications. You know how to talk to REST (and non-REST) services.
You may not be test-driven, but you understand what testing buys you and use tests when appropriate. You’ve worked with complex web sites long enough to understand their maintenance challenges and be proactive about addressing those challenges.
You have experience working in languages other than Javascript. While your primary responsibilities will focus on front-end development, familiarity with back-end technologies like Django, Node, Electron app deployment, or Go are a plus and may come into play in other projects.
Another thing that’s important is your ability to work and communicate remotely with folks in different time zones. We are a distributed company, with key staff in time zones across the US. We rely heavily on online tools — Slack, Trello, Basecamp — for talking, sharing design materials, and providing feedback. Our approach is to schedule a meeting (usually a regular Monday check-in), send an artifact ahead of time with specific feedback requests, meet to discuss, then work independently on follow-up action items. Since much of our communication is asynchronous, your ability to write clearly and well is important.
Interested? Email jobs2019@inquirium.net.