Title

Architect – UI/Web Engineering

Reports to

Executive Director of Engineering

Overview

The URBN Engineering team is responsible for building the front-end experiences that power URBN’s major brands: Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People. Our challenges range from writing algorithms which serve personalized landing pages to solving the complex UI data structures of our product detail pages. We work closely with embedded product, user experience, and design teams to build performant and forward-thinking e-commerce experiences for our customers.

We’re looking for a talented and self-motivated front-end software architect to join our engineering group. Do you enjoy building inclusive, performant, accessible, and standards-compliant websites? Us too! Do you appreciate learning, iterating, and solving new challenges? That’s great! We have the unique task of improving customer interactions across our e-commerce sites every day. Have you ever wanted to contribute to a code base used by millions of customers? Do you want to be part of a team that gets to improve upon that code base as a result of user testing, data gathering, and performance audits? We think it’s a unique and rewarding endeavor and if you do too, we’d love to hear from you!

Responsibilities

• Implementing and maintaining the web user interfaces that power all URBN Brands from a single code base.

• Modeling expertise in writing code that is readable, maintainable, well tested, and documented.

• Designing efficient and reusable front-end systems (JavaScript/Node/Vue.js).

• Collaborating with Product Designers, Product Managers, and other Software Engineers to deliver compelling user-facing products.

• Ability to balance and adapt communication across different engineering practices and executive leadership

• Performance, scalability, and accessibility are top of mind. Finding ways to weave improvements in these areas into all our work is a must.

• Contribute ideas for improvement around coding standards and process to ensure we are applying modern best practices to our work.

• Collaborates across engineering disciplines and works to improve the total platform

• Participates in Pair Programming and presenting tech topics to the team.

• Practicing graceful, thoughtful, and effective peer review.

• Acting as a mentor to other engineers helping to improve their own technical and system design capabilities.

• Leading medium to large feature implementation with low oversight.

Qualifications

• Expert knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (ES6+), Node, asynchronous programming, JSON

• High proficiency with browser APIs

• Deep understanding of the HTTP protocol (status codes, http verbs)

• Able to implement best practices for SEO and Accessibility across many devices

• Highly proficient using developer tools, IDEs debugging, and third-party tools such as Google’s Lighthouse to optimize web page and code performance

• Demonstrated understanding of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation

• Demonstrated expertise with responsive web design patterns in semantic HTML/CSS

• CSS and JS preprocessing like SASS / Babel

• Ability to drive Git processes, branching strategy, and conflict resolution

• Strong communications skills - able to discuss complex technical problems across teams and non-technical audiences

• Expert with at least one modern JavaScript frameworks (Vue, React) and Webpack ; familiarity with more than one

• Deep understanding of state management methods and implementation (Vuex/Redux)

• Demonstrated expertise writing universal/isomorphic web applications using Node

• Deep understanding of RESTful paradigms

• High proficiency with Continuous Integration and build automation

• Device and browser testing using automation (testcafe/webdriver.io)

• Demonstrated experience mentoring others and building overall team skillsets.

• Active in the open source community

• Demonstrated proficiency and obsession with performance budgeting and performance improvements

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or experience in a related field.

Location

Philadelphia, PA

Travel

Minimal.

The above information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.