Situation Publishing Perl Developer

Situation Publishing, the owner of The Register, is looking for a full-stack software developer.

About the Role

You will manage the full life-cycle of software projects from small to large. This will include consultation with the business, and the design, development, and testing of code. There will be a mix of new projects, refactoring of legacy code, and bug fixing. Most of your work will be with our back-end Perl code that runs on our Debian servers, but you should not be afraid to get your hands dirty with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We have nascent plans to start developing in Rust, too, so any experience with Rust will be a bonus.

As our readership grows and revenue streams change, there is a steady flow of work. You will ensure that our website remains performant and that our journalists have the tools they need. We need your help in keeping the business profitable whilst ensuring that we can provide great free content to our readers.

Candidate Qualities

The ideal candidate will be able to do more than just tick boxes on a requirements list. We are a small team and we wear many hats; the right candidate will be knowledgeable, adaptable, and eager to learn.

Required:

The following are some things that we consider to be very important for the role because without them you are likely to struggle.

  • Good communication and listening skills.
  • Excellent written and verbal English.
  • Excellent reading comprehension and attention to detail.
  • The legal right to work with us from your country of residence.
  • Experience writing high quality Perl.
  • Experience writing valid HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
  • Experience with SQL and ORMs such as DBIx::Class.
  • Great Linux experience (we use Debian stable).
  • Excellent knowledge of SSH, bash & sh, pipes, common UNIX tools, and the UNIX way.
  • Good familiarity with version control software such as Git.

Desirable:

The following are things that would be useful, but we don't expect candidates to have experience with our entire tech stack from the outset.

  • Experience with templating systems such as Template::Toolkit or Text::Xslate.
  • A working knowledge of Apache and nginx.
  • Experience working with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Our Tech Stack and Team

Our tech team is small, distributed, focused, and has autonomy. You need to produce great work without being enticed by a carrot or threatened by a stick. We don't always use the latest and greatest, and we don't always "just put it in the cloud". We are not averse to either, but if you're looking to fill your CV with trendy buzzwords, look elsewhere.

Broadly put, we favour open source. We use Debian, Apache, Nginx, Exim, Redis, MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL in our stack. We often write our own tools using Perl, Bash, HTML, CSS, JS. We rely on Git for process and revision control.

You will need to be comfortable communicating with the wider team and the business via email, phone, instant messaging, and online document tools such as Google Docs.

Interested?

To apply, please send your CV to tech.recruitment@theregister.com and include a cover letter describing why you’d like to work with us and what you think you could bring to our team. Please include:

  • Your gross salary/annual compensation expectations.
  • Brief answers to the following:
    • What can make software hard to test?
    • Explain one thing that you most dislike about Perl.

If we like your CV and cover letter, we will contact you requesting you answer a short test before scheduling an initial interview via Google Meet.

We look forward to hearing from you.