Job Description

Note: If you are viewing this job on Indeed.com, please consider using this link to apply. We find that when people apply through Indeed.com, the cover letter is not included. Because this job involves communicating with clients, we need to see a cover letter to consider your application.

We're looking for a client-focused web developer to manage incoming requests from our clients.

Currently, about 40% of our revenue comes from annual retainer agreements that we put in place with our clients after we've launched their website (or web application). Each month, we perform a combination of routine maintenance and new development for these clients. We answer their questions, help them when they need help, and make sure they feel supported. Over time, we build close relationships with these clients, many of whom have happily been working with us for five to ten years. If we keep these clients happy, they eventually decide to rebuild their website (or web application), and they come to us to help them with that.

The other 60% of our revenue comes from new project work. We rarely take on startup projects, and instead focus on building things for established companies and non-profits. We also do a lot of work on grant-funded, academic projects. This project work generally leads to new retainers when it's completed.

This is where you come in. We've reached a point where we need to formalize the services we deliver under these retainer agreements. Your job will involve managing the work to be done for retainer clients each month. When the request is within your abilities, you'll go ahead and do the development yourself. If the request requires a more senior developer, your job will involve communicating with the client to understand the requirements, handing the request off to a senior developer, assisting with development where appropriate, making sure the request gets resolved, and communicating the resolution back to the client. If you have free time, you'll work on our internal tools for automating some of the services we provide under these retainers.

ABOUT CAST IRON CODING

Cast Iron Coding is a web development studio. We build thingsCMS driven websites, small brochure sites, large open-source applications, internal business web applications, backend APIsfor our clients. While we regularly use a variety of frontend and backend languages and technologies, all of our projects are built on the core web technologies of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Consequently, most, but not all, of our projects run in a browser.

Unlike many firms that turn jobs around quickly and move on to the next project, we're in it for the long haul with all our clients, so we care a great deal about the craft that goes into what we build. We've been building web sites, web apps, and mobile apps since about 2004, for a wide variety of clients.

If you took a snapshot of what we're working on right now, you'd see a company willing to take on a variety of different kinds of projects, including:

• We're building an open source, academic publishing platform called Manifold under a Mellon Foundation grant.
• We just finished building a web application that helps Oregonians facing food insecurity find food assistance sites.
• We're building new sites for an art gallery in New York City and for a large animal rescue operation in CA.
• We're building a dashboard for a fortune 500 company that helps employees track the publication and performance of thousands of online resources
• We're doing a new round of development on a web app that encourages people to change their behavior so that it's more eco-friendly and sustainable.
• We're getting started on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that digitizes and visualizes thousands of hand-written responses provided by soldiers returning from WWII.

One of the true pleasures of working at Cast Iron Coding is that we work on projects that interest us across a wide variety of sectors. We like working with small businesses, academics, nonprofits, and organizations we admire. But we also like sinking our teeth into a thorny, difficult enterprise project where revenue is at stake. We love a big challenge, and problems that make us think hard about what we're building. We've been at this long enough nowabout 15 yearsand we've resisted growing fast or sacrificing quality. Our clients speak highly of us and, perhaps a better metric, our past employees who've moved on to greener pastures still come back to hang out and grab a beer with the team.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Let's face it. The field we work intech generally, programming specificallyhas a diversity problem. Like many in the industry, we'd like to see this change. Cast Iron Coding is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to the principle of diversity. As such, we are particularly interested in receiving applications from a broad spectrum of people.

REQUIREMENTS

Your regular duties will include:

• Touch base with every retainer client on a month basis and learn about their needs. You'll discuss their requests with them and set realistic expectations based on the number of hours in the retainer.
• Build a rapport with the client and being the face of Cast Iron for our retainer clients.
• At our regular meetings, keep the internal Cast Iron team up-to-date on issues that our retainer clients might be facing.
• Work with our scheduling lead to make sure retainer commitments are accurately represented on our agency schedule.
• Translate client requests to issues in our issue tracker. Maintain the issue backlogs on retainer projects.
• Review pull requests and test work before releasing it to staging. Make sure approved work is released to production.
• Communicate more complex or advanced requests to senior developers and tracking the issue.
• Undertake small development tasks on a variety of systems including Craft, Wordpress, October, TYPO3, and Rails.
• Perform monthly maintenance tasks, such as making sure the underlying platform is up-to-date, checking SSL certificate expiration, making sure backups are being run, etc. Many of these tasks are or can be automated.
• Help maintain our Slack bot that tracks completion of retainer tasks in an Airtable database.
• When retainer work is light, help out on other projects at Cast Iron as needed.

We're looking for applicants with the following traits:

• You're organized and detail oriented. You stay on top of open issues and pull requests, and make sure they get resolved and released.
• You're a good listener and a careful communicator with strong writing skills.
• You're good at listening to clients and understanding their needs, plans, frustrations, etc.
• You're calm, patient, kind, and a pleasure to work with.
• You're a quick study and eager to be mentored by senior developers.
• You're a thoughtful, critical thinker. A computer science degree is by no means necessary for this position, but we'd like to see a college degree.

To be successful, you'll need to bring these skills to the position:

• You'll need a foundation in core web technologies (HTML + CSS + JS, and some PHP)
• You've worked with at least one content management system (ideally Craft, Wordpress, or October)
• You'll be good at figuring out how to construct reproducible processes and finding more efficent ways to deliver services to our clients.
• You know how to work with other developers on a team and know how to track issues, adhere to shared code style and conventions; use Git for branching, merging, and rebasing; and write code that is easy to understand.
• Cast Iron is currently working 100% remotely due to COVID-19 and expect that we'll be remote until at least 2021, so you'll need to be comfortable working with remote clients and teammates.
• You should be able to read documentation and try to solve problems on your own. You also need to be able to judge when you're spinning your wheels and figure out how to formulate targeted questions directed at senior developers to help you get unstuck.

Bonus points if you have experience with the following:

• React and/or advanced Javascript
• Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails
• Jenkins or other CI tools like Travis or Github Actions
• Popular services (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Nginx, Elasticsearch, Docker)
• AWS or Google Cloud Services
• Static site generators like Next.js or Gatsby

BENEFITS

• You get to work with a team of programmers who are technically competent and who, additionally, bring a strong background in the humanities to their work.
• Our team members trust and support each other. We value mentorship and collaboration, and we support learning and experimentation. Before COVID, we'd play board games together every couple of weeks. These days, we have a great time playing D&D online over Zoom.
• You will be given a reasonable starting salary, depending on your experience. This salary will almost certainly be less than what a startup flush with venture capital or a much larger company might offer. In return for making a little bit less money, we won't make you go to (very many) pointless meetings, and we won't expect you to give up your life outside of work to be successful at work. You'll work regular 9-5 hours, and most of your time at work will be spent feeling productive. Moreover, if you stay at CIC for a while and prosper as a developer, your salary will increase each year. In addition to your salary, you will likely receive a substantial winter bonus each year.
• You will receive top-notch health insurance, including dental and nontraditional medicine. CIC will pay 50% of your health insurance premium on our group plan, as well as 50% of the insurance cost for your partner and, if you have them, your children.
• You will have the option of enrolling in our 401k plan.
• You'll be offered ample vacation and sick leave. Life-work balance matters, and we try hard to help employees stay healthy and happy.
• You can work from home, work from the office, or a mix of the two. We recently moved out of Washington High School and are now sharing a space with Brink Communications in SE Portland until Q3, 2021. Later next year we will build out a new space that better supports the hybrid work-from-home / in-person model that we envision going forward.