About Portable

Our mission is to seek out areas of social need and policy failure and make transformational change using design and technology. We believe that government, organisations and businesses can be forces for good. But there’s a gap in their understanding of, and ability to meet, the expectations of those in need of positive change. Our job is to use design and technology to narrow the gap between those with the power and responsibility to make a positive change, and those who need it.

We are looking for someone who is:

• Able to work collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams of designs, developers and producers
• Seeking opportunities to learn, and helps others by providing feedback
• Familiar with our preferred stacks and is able to efficiently and effectively work in those environments
• Comfortable with working with legacy systems and has experience in evolving those systems over time
• Able to communicate clearly to a broad range of stakeholders, both in person and in writing

As an agency we have a number of projects running in different technical stacks. Some of our preferred stacks include:

Modern Javascript Front End Application

• Languages: TypeScript or ES6 (Javascript via Babel)
• Frameworks: React, Vue
• CSS: SASS/PostCSS, Styled Components/Emotion
• Component Libraries: Rebass, Material UI
• Build tools: Webpack

Modern Backend API

• Languages: TypeScript, PHP
• API Standards: JSON API, GraphQL
• Frameworks: NestJS, Express, Serverless
• Cloud Providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure

Single-stack CMS websites

• Languages: PHP7
• Frameworks: Wordpress via roots.io (Sage, Bedrock, Trellis)
• Hosting providers: Kinsta hosted
• Additional interactive components and site elements in React

Enterprise/Government related sites

• PHP
• Silverstripe, Drupal (GovCMS, Victorian Government SDP), Laravel

An example of what a day a Portable as a Senior Software Engineer might look like:

• Reviewing a few pull requests to help individuals and the team grow with their ability to commit good code to projects
• Pairing and mentoring on a feature with a mid-level or junior developer to provide directed advice and guidance that will help them grow professionally as a developer
• Helping lead our PDX (Portable Developer Experience) meetings where we discuss, have workshops and generally look at how we go about development at Portable as a team
• Collaborating with project managers to advise on scope for features as well as assist with the execution of the overall project architecture
• Spending some time writing code - implementing new APIs for a justice project and adding new elements to the UI components for a public sector project
• Deploying the public sector project - and sticking around to make sure the deployment was successful
• Participating in a design & ideation workshop with Luke, our Design Strategist and Law Researcher for the legal project
• Scoping new work with Chey, our Business Development Specialist, helping think through what the project would take to implement, and how much we should bid for it
• Worked with the team to do some sprint planning, writing up some tickets in Jira and thinking about how you could break up the tasks to give some learning opportunities to the junior devs. And planned to have some of your time to be available to mentor them while they pair.
• Watching the lunchtime jogging team run out the door from the comfort of your ergonomic chair. You could join in, if you like?

We’ve recently launched an ODR (Online Dispute Resolution) product into public beta testing with Legal Services Commission of South Australia in order to provide a simpler way for couples to split amicably. Some of the key technical pieces included deploying the infrastructure on AWS using the serverless framework in conjunction with CloudFormation to fill in other required services. There was also a significant piece of work in which a python application running on ElasticBeanstalk provides predictions on asset splits by training a machine learning algorithm with historical anonymised data.

Remuneration

The salary range for this role is between $100,000 - $120,000, depending on your level of experience. We are committed to building a diverse and equal team - people from traditionally underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply.

How to apply

To be considered, please send us your resume and a cover letter answering the following questions:

1. Tell us about something that you’ve been learning recently. What is it, how are you learning it and what made you decide to learn this thing?
2. What’s a challenging technical problem you or your team have solved? What made it challenging, how did you solve it and what part did you play?
3. Tell us about a great working relationship you’ve had with someone. How did you work together? What’s something you learned from that experience?