Software Engineer (Frontend JavaScript, Customer-Facing)

takealot.com, a leading South African online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Software Engineer (Frontend JavaScript, Customer-Facing) to join our team in Cape Town. 

We are a young, dynamic, hyper growth company looking for smart, creative, hard- working people with integrity to join us. We offer a market related, Total Remuneration Package which allows full flexibility according to your needs, a great work environment and a promise that you won’t be bored as long as you are prepared for a challenge and want to build something great.

The position reports to the Shopfront Engineering Team Lead.

Your responsibilities will include the following:

• To assist design, develop and refine new features
• Locate and resolve bugs and crashes
• Brainstorm new ideas and concepts
• Work with teammates on design, code reviews, and estimation
• Implement front-end JavaScript coding at a senior level with a focus on performance, maintainability and testable code.
• Create modules and components to incorporate them together into a functional site.
• Work closely with the designers and back-end developers, and communicate primarily with the API using standard methods, as well as be expected to make modifications to the existing PHP code.

Attributes required:

• Be accountable
• Creative
• Solutions oriented
• Flexible
• Take pride in your work

Qualifications and experience:

• Degree in Computer Science or Engineering or equivalent experience 
• A minimum of 3+ years of experience as a Front-End Developer writing code
• Very proficient in coding plain JavaScript from scratch 
• Understands inheritance in JavaScript and advanced JavaScript techniques
• Appreciation and understanding of object-oriented programming concepts
• Solid experience writing performant front-end code based on MVC JavaScript Frameworks (React is preferred, but AngularJS, Meteor, Backbone, etc. are a good start)
• Experience in XHTML, Html5, CSS and taking high definition designs/PSD's and producing fast efficient HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Good understanding of asynchronous request handling, partial page updates, and AJAX
• Knowledge and experience cross browser and cross device compatible solutions including for mobile
• Experience with CSS pre-compilers such as Less or Sass
• You should love doing this kind of stuff! Not afraid to try new things just to see how they work.  
• Able to evaluate and learn new libraries, frameworks, concepts to validate whether they might be of value to our team
• Experience using a source control solution such as Git
• PHP experience very desirable
• Linux experience
• React JS experience
• Back-bone JS experience
• Experience writing front-end unit tests
• Full stack experience of any sort is advantageous
• Has worked within an agile development team using scrum/kanban
• Experience producing responsive html designs

The Environment:

• takealot.com employees are entrepreneurial and dynamic, smart, customer-centric, fun and have the shared ambition of takealot.com being the leading e-commerce company in Africa.
• We have fun, work hard, take ownership, work in teams to create solutions, and are always open to direct feedback/new ideas on where we can improve.
• We are short on ego and high on output.
• We are doers and not only thinkers, it’s all in the execution after all.
• We love what we do and what we are creating.

We seek to Employ an Extra Ordinary Mind who

• is forthright but respectful
• is an expert at doing, who can not only design but also execute
• is analytical, able to use data to make decisions
• is competitive, self-directed and strive to be the BEST (GREAT requires a lot of work and does not only happen during business hours
• is passionate about the potential of e-commerce and delivering a world-class customer experience
• is entrepreneurial, thrives under change and accepts it is a constant and always looks for solutions to do something better and faster
• is able to think about problems from a business perspective using technical and product input
• is curious and challenge the status quo
• is innovative and enjoys iteration
• is collaborative
• will be at the cutting edge of developing new concepts for takealot.com.
• thinks like an owner of the business.
• is SMART, has INTEGRITY and is HARDWORKING

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind so come and join us!

Takealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from the previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference.