Responsibilities
The Senior Web Developer is responsible for delivering website requirements, ensuring that websites are up and running, and resolving technical issues. S/He will directly supervise a junior developer and works under the direct supervision of the Head of Communications. More specifically, the responsibilities of the Senior Web Developer include:
Website development for both front and back end
- Working with stakeholders to gather requirements, refine and ensure that they adequately meet business needs
- Scheduling and ensuring that requirements are delivered in time
- Ensure that proposed/implemented solutions do not introduce regression to user experience
- Propose and build solutions that scale along with the organisation
- Researching and staying up to date with new technologies to incorporate new trends
Operations, security, and availability management
- Act as a first line of response to incidents, log and classify issues, then delegate accordingly
- Troubleshoot, debug, and apply fixes to issues
- Proactively monitor key indicators, including uptime, application performance, and response time (apdex).
- Optimize websites for performance, availability, and security
- Stay up to date with secure coding practices and ensure that they are incorporated in the development workflow
- Take ownership and provide direction on platform architecture, infrastructure, governance, and workflows.
Process and quality management
- Utilize automation to boost turnaround time while maintaining a high level of quality and confidence
- Ensure that code produced is always of high quality and participate in activities to that end i.e. code reviews, pair programming, test driven development, refactoring.
- Ensure that accessibility standards are always in line with industry best practices
- Establish standards and guidelines and play a key role in ensuring that they are always up to date
- Stay up to date with web development best practices, applying to day-to-day activities accordingly
- Ensure that documentation is sufficient and up to date
Collaborate and provide support to colleagues
- Working together with junior developers while also providing mentorship and support where necessary
- Working with other members of the team to generate compelling outreach products for the organization
- Facilitate/foster continuous improvement
Engage with stakeholders
- Enable non-technical stakeholders to make well informed decisions on technical matters by providing clear, concise, and non-technical explanations.
- Participate in internal and external events to build and maintain relationships and share knowledge and/or best practices.
- Procure and engage with external vendors to supplement capacity
Key performance indicators
- Create timeframes and schedules to ensure deadlines are met
- Prepare specifications to meet stakeholder requirements
- Engage with stakeholders to build trust and acquire buy in
- Support and provide training/mentorship to junior web developers
Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in computing, computer science, software engineering or another relevant field
Experience
- At least 10 years of experience in web development, ideally full stack
- Expertise in PHP, JavaScript
- Experience with datastores, preferably MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres
- Experience with unit testing, preferably test-driven development
- Good understanding of Object-Oriented Programming, Design patterns and related principles
- Experience with CMS development, preferably Drupal or WordPress
- Experience building microservices or API driven integrations and maintaining API documentation
- A deep understanding of web development stages and methodologies, preferably Agile
- Experience with cloud platforms, containerization, and continuous integration
- Experience with analytics and reporting, preferably Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio
- Good understanding of secure web development practices, familiarity with diagnostic tools and performance monitoring tools
- Capable of explaining technical jargon to non-technical stakeholders