Now Hiring: Staff Software Engineer, Themes

this job posting is closed for now

About Gatsby

Gatsby is a remote-first, community-focused team working to build a high-performance, fun to use, accessible, and astonishingly flexible presentation layer for any data source. Our core values include transparency (we work in public most of the time); creating a safe, high-trust team; building incredible developer experiences; maintaining a healthy working environment; and helping deliver web experiences that feel amazing to use on every device and connection type.

Details of the role

• Type of Work: Full-time employee
• Location: Remote (US or International). Preference for UTC-8 to UTC+4.
• Engineering Level: Staff (see our Engineering Levels Guide)

Why we’re hiring

Gatsby is growing fast, and we need help improving Gatsby.js to help it realize its potential!

Gatsby themes are the latest building blocks for Gatsby-based websites. Your role will be crucial in further iterating on the developer experience and developing new abstractions for blogs, documentation sites, and even ecommerce. This includes low-level features like GraphQL data providers or AST manipulations in core plugins and high-level innovations which might include a WYSIWYG page builder or dynamic layouts in themes.

Why this is interesting

The themes team has a heavy focus on R&D and creating new patterns for building Gatsby sites. Themes are a relatively new paradigm and there are a lot of improvements to be made. You’ll get opportunities to conceptualize and prototype new ideas, and you’ll have the freedom to prioritize your own work based on what you think will have the highest impact.

The themes team helps to maintain projects outside of the Gatsby monorepo including MDX and Theme UI. Within your role you might find yourself fixing bugs or adding new features to these libraries as well.

What you’ll do on a day-to-day basis

As a member of the themes team, you’ll work on maintaining the core projects that the themes team owns. This includes the shadowing algorithm, core themes, and gatsby-plugin-mdx. This will be roughly 30% of your time.

In addition to maintenance you’ll work on new, ambitious projects which might include a theme CLI, a standard component library for Theme UI, a page builder, or design system tooling. This will be roughly 70% of your time.

Depending on the day, you might:

• Conceptualize and prototype new tooling for the web and the Gatsby ecosystem. A non-trivial amount of your time will be devoted to inventing new tools that make building with Gatsby even more productive. This includes experimenting in the visual coding space to make Gatsby more approachable to users of varying technical ability.
• Build a modern, theming architecture from the ground up using the latest and greatest in web technology. The themes team maintains theme-ui and the system-ui theme specification which ensures interoperability amongst existing tooling and the ability to work at scale without unintended side effects in CSS.
• Improve content authoring by working on MDX core and gatsby-plugin-mdx. Combining content with components is a challenging problem that will test parsing and AST fundamentals (if you want to).
• Work on Gatsby core to build new features for Gatsby themes and review community member contributions. The themes team works closely with core to implement new APIs and improve the developer experience.

Experience you have

• Expertise with component libraries and building user interfaces with React and CSS-in-JS. A lot of day-to-day work will include working with React to experiment with new patterns, write new developer tools, and even build official themes.
• Ability to come up with new ideas and realize them with code. There are many tools that we have to build in order to ensure a robust and vibrant ecosystem.
• Building prototypes with minimal guidance. Showing concepts with a prototype is more effective than telling, so we make this an integral aspect of our workflows. This means spending short bursts of time creating minimal viable products (MVPs) to illustrate an idea.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. The themes team is often pioneering new technology, explaining the motivation for a new library is as important as building the library itself. You’ll also be interacting with members of the community on a regular basis, so being clear, concise, and friendly is important.

Experience it would be nice if you had, but isn’t required

• You’ve dabbled with design and the latest design tools, especially if you’ve built integrations for Framer X or Figma plugins. In order for Gatsby to become the best in class development framework we’ll need to integrate with the most popular tools and begin incrementally adopting some of their features.
• You have experience with modern front end tools such as React and CSS-in-JS. Gatsby’s architecture is in many ways inspired by these tools, and you’ll need to incorporate ideas from them into open source on a regular basis.
• You’ve maintained an active repository before. Maybe you’ve helped maintain a popular open source repo, or maybe you’ve worked on internal repos that saw contributions from multiple teams. Previous experience with highly active repo workflows is a definite plus for this role.
• You’ve had experience with styled-system or utility CSS. Many theme projects are heavily inspired by these concepts to ensure consistency in official themes and pave the way for new tools to integrate with code.

The best parts of this job

• You’ll be at the cutting edge of website development — working on one of the fastest-growing site building frameworks on the market where you’ll help to create new tooling that will make the developer experience of Gatsby even better!
• Your work will have a direct impact on the day to day workflow of developers and the users they serve.
• You’ll be part of an active, open, friendly community of developers that are really excited about building high-performance, fun-to-use websites.
• You’ll be working in a safe, open environment of talented engineers who have a broad range of experience.
• Your role will be key to making Gatsby the next way to build on the web — and a technology that is accessible to the next billion internet users.

The most challenging parts of the job

• The work you would be doing is somewhat unique and idiosyncratic. You probably have not had a similar role before and some of the problems that need to be solved won’t have much prior art to reference.
• The work on themes can be a frustrating combination of design and low-level tooling. You might find yourself designing and building a blog in React one day, and deep in babel plugins the next day.
• In open source, you’re faced with a nonstop stream of bug reports and support requests. That means you need to develop intuition around what’s most important right now.

Benefits we offer

• 3 months of paid parental leave covering both adoption and foster placement
• Unlimited vacation policy, with a minimum of 15 days paid vacation time
• Amazing health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family (US only)
• Skip the commute with remote work
• Fly to cool locations 3x/year for company-wide meetups
• Stock options in a fast-growing startup
• Gatsby Sabbatical: 4 weeks paid vacation after 4 years tenure

Our hiring process

Gatsby is an equal opportunity employer. We eagerly seek applicants of diverse backgrounds and hire without regard to race, color, gender identity, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, physical abilities (or disability), age, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cultivating inclusivity and diversity is a top priority.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Gatsby does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Gatsby.