About BaseKit
BaseKit is a software development company founded in 2008, some of our 30 staff are based near Bristol with others from the rest of the UK, Spain and Italy. The BaseKit platform is a responsive website builder used by over 100 telcos and web hosting providers worldwide and powers over 9 million websites. The responsive site editor allows website creation from mobile, tablet and desktop devices, enabling anyone to publish a beautiful website.
Our Culture
As a team, we strive to be collaborative, open to new ideas and supportive of each other. We believe that a good team means work is a place of learning and personal growth without being a chore.
We want everyone to share our values of inclusiveness, openness and working great together. We also recognise that written company values mean nothing if they aren’t backed up by our day to day behaviour.
BaseKit provides many perks in and out of work to all staff. First and foremost we prize work life balance, and the wellbeing of our employees, above all else. Before the official government lockdown we recognised the potential danger our staff could be in by coming into the office each day and allowed all staff to work from home full-time. During lockdown we ensured all staff had the equipment they needed at home and allowed staff to significantly adjust working hours to deal with the new found issues we all experienced during the pandemic. In addition we also offer perks such as private health care, yoga, lunch and learn days and company days out to name just some of them. We’ve worked hard to build a great development team here at BaseKit and we do everything possible to ensure the team is friendly and has a great bond.
Whilst we do still have an office in central Bristol, that staff are welcome to use if they choose, we are a remote first company and this role can be fully remote within a 2 hour timezone difference of the UK. Our core hours are 10:00-16:00 GMT Monday to Thursday and 10:00-12:00 GMT on Friday, with many staff taking the opportunity to work half a day on Friday.
Our Development Team
We recognise the importance of our developers, and ensure we provide them with the right tools to do their job. Our team use a mixture of MacBook Pros and high-end Linux laptops. We supply these and any other necessary equipment for our colleagues to work comfortably, be it remote or in the office.
The development community is important to us too, in pre-Covid19 days we used to host meetups in our office and we encourage the team to contribute to open source projects.
We really love it when we can see the GitHub profile of people applying for roles in our team. If you have a public GitHub profile, we’d be ecstatic if you sent it over. Don’t worry, we’ve got lots of unfinished side projects and test code on our profiles, we don’t expect to see a profile full of perfect code.
We understand the need to keep your skills up to date and the natural curiosity of software developers. In the spirit of this we have a 90/10 policy designed to give you some space to build something interesting, try a new technology or just fix a bug that’s been annoying you.
Technical Knowledge/Skills
As a front end software engineer experienced in working on large complex web applications you'll be used to writing high quality frontend code using current industry best practice, this should also be backed up by a good understanding of javascript fundamentals and the web. Whilst we do maintain an amount of legacy code, we are continually moving forward and refactoring, so any new code is always using the latest ECMAScript features and in more recent projects we have adopted typescript.
Essentially, we're looking for a developer with a good understanding of modern web development. We use a react/redux architecture in our new projects and we maintain and improve on our existing products which primarily use backbone and marionette. Ultimately we believe that good software engineers are able to adapt to the problem at hand so it’s not essential you have a deep knowledge of these libraries but some experience is always good to see.
In our codebase it’s unavoidable that you’ll have to write some HTML and CSS so competency with these is good. We use Sass (more specifically SCSS) when creating styles, we have some legacy code that uses Less too and we use twig for our markup.
It would be a great advantage to have done at least some testing (either unit or behavioural) in JavaScript, we use Jasmine (and Enzyme) to write behavioural and unit tests for our front end code, and Puppeteer for functional tests.
We have a continuous integration & build process for our JavaScript that uses (amongst other things) Webpack, we would like you to have some experience using similar build tools.