Full stack software developer in SaaS team

NOTE! This listing is out of date, and we are not currently looking for new team members. However, if you've made it this far, and feel like you would be a perfect fit, feel free to reach out to us regardless!

We are looking for a full stack developer to start working in the core team developing and running SaaS products used by media companies in Scandinavia and the Nordics.

We're a 16 people team developing and providing SaaS services to media companies. Aptoma was founded in 2004, and was built from the ground up to support digital media companies.

Aptoma technology has powered WAN-IFRA World Award winning digital media products for many years. Digital news products deserve usability and design perfection, on all screen sizes. With Aptoma technologies, this finally can be accomplished using automations.

Some sites that are fully or partially powered by the Aptoma Media Platform are:
https://dn.no
https://berlingske.dk
https://eb.dk
https://finansavisen.no
https://vg.no
https://fyens.dk/
https://abcnyheter.no
https://nettavisen.no
https://dr.dk
https://bt.dk
https://budstikka.no
… and hundreds more

Why we're looking for you right now

We are looking for full stack developer to join our development team. The team is working on improving the editorial workflow. We help the media industry to be more efficient by automating tedious, low value manual tasks, and creating powerful tools for expressing journalistic intent. In short, we automate all that can be automated, so that the journalists can focus on pure value creation.

During your first year in Aptoma, you will join one of two teams, both working to improve tools for well known media brands. Our in-house layout technology is already rivalling what can be achieved through manual labour in Adobe InDesign, automatically producing high quality print pages in seconds. We are also working on features for adding the human touch after the automations.

We have reinvented print as a responsive web-page in the browser, which makes the print version a technological basis for making proper digital versions of the daily editions. Daily editions are responsible for more than 60% of total revenue at most media companies, and will play an imperative role also digitally in the future.

Our teams are also daily at work perfecting automation of web front pages, article production, and more.

Depending on where your strengths are, and what our exact challenges are when you join our team, your role may include adding new features to our React based frontend, write Node.js apps to orchestrate our headless browsers, fiddle around with AWS services to create efficient scheduling and resource allocation, or write serverless functions or Docker microservices for connecting all the bits and pieces.

Your skillset must include

Front-end development — JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
Back-end development — APIs, and document- and relational databases.
UX a basic level of interest and abilities is needed to thrive around us.

Basically you should be a back-end developer capable of front-end work as well, or a front-end developer capable of back-end as well.

We're not dogmatic about which technologies to use nor to which technologies you are used to — but naturally we have a set of established preferences which you need to be open to using, such as Node JS, React, JavaScript, MongoDB, MySQL and Amazon Web Services are technologies and services we have an affinity for.

Your skillset can include

Management: We are open for up to 20% of your time being dedicated to customer service, customer project management and/or sales activities, if this aligns with your ambitions, interests, and capabilities.

What we expect from you

Tabs and semicolons (we had to decide something to avoid this whole situation)
End-to-end responsibility: You'll usually be responsible for tasks from start to finish — that is, from requirements phase and during tech. specs, UX specs, development, deployment, bug fixing and direct communciation with customers on support tickets relating to your features. We try not to do any handovers during feature development.
Tech and UX development: While we expect decent UX and tech solutions from you, you will have colleagues interested in reviewing your pull reqests and UX proposals as part of our QA process.
Talk to customers: When required to solve the task, you'll engage with the customer without any mediation.
Autonomy: We have no full-time managers (and probably never will have), so sometimes your manager will be busy developing and not following up on you. You'll have to raise relevant questions and concerns yourself.
Integrity: If you have enough on your plate and we're trying to give you another task, you need to make it explicitly clear that you'll need to offload other tasks to accomodate more work.
Criticism: At the core of our productivity with a small team is our ability to reveal why something shouldn't be done — we expect you to point to problems and potential problems whenever you see them.

What we don't expect from you

We don't expect you to thrive on multitasking — we know multitasking can reduce productivity for many. We include that in our cost/benefit considerations.
We expect you not to say yes to any meeting — it's appropriate to require a reason for your attendance to a meeting.
We don't expect you to be extrovert — while you should be able to communicate when needed, we usually prefer silent get-shit-done-productivity when there's nothing of importance to discuss.

What we can provide

Interesting and challenging development tasks with a clear purpose.
Seniors on first line of support — you won't be called after hours with mundane questions.
A desk, a computer and free coffee
Productive silence at the office.
Flexitime outside core hours 09-15.
Ad hoc use of home office.
Competitive salary and pension arrangements.
Shower at the office and a safe place to stash your bike.
A yearly company trip — nothing fancy, though.
The odd skiing trip, boat trip, and trip to the beach.
A monthly-ish snack and drink with colleagues.

What we can't provide

Hand holding — to get help, you'll usually have to ask for it.
A safe place to hide — there is not always backlog to pull tasks from nor a ticket system with ready todo tech tasks. Sometimes we all have to reach out to people to figure things out.
Glamour — we're craftsmen 99% of the time.
Freedom from legacy tech — while we invest heavily in modernising our tech base, we still have backends developed in PHP etc. Whenever required, we maintain, modify and extend those technologies.
A large organisation — our modestly sized organisation is built around a dozen or so very capable, skilled, strong and autonomous individuals more than anything else.

How Aptoma is run

There's a weekly 30 minutes all-hands meeting preceded by a weekly written report from the CEO. For the rest of the week talk on company matters is on chat, or on the occasional specific topic meetings.

There is a weekly or bi-weekly status and planning meeting (STAPL) for each team, where priorities are discussed and decided orally. Every team has a lead.

We have a business team run by CEO which is preparing all major product and/or company decisions, but these decisions are all made in the all-hands meeting.

The company is fully owned by the CEO and some of the employees, and everyone has a fair chance to influence and object to decisions.

To apply

Send your application and resumé to geir@aptoma.com
Subject: “Application – Full stack software developer”
Applications can be submitted in Norwegian, Swedish and English.
Applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis.