Job Summary

Square Panda is seeking a Front-End Software Engineer at our Sunnyvale, CA headquarters who will work with the internal Square Panda team (engineering, product, educational curriculum) and external engineering teams to develop, and extend our cloud-based services. Square Panda’s Educational Cloud Platform delivers critical functionality to our innovative educational technology products.

The primary duties of the Front-End Software Engineer include translation of the UI/UX design wireframes to actual code that will produce visual elements of the application. You will work with the UI/UX designer and other product stakeholders to bridge the gap between graphical design and technical implementation.  Additional duties might include developing internal tools, technical research projects and other duties as required.  We have clients that will access the front-end using both traditional (desktop/laptop) browsers and browser on mobile devices.

The successful candidate will be strongly versed in software development processes.  Previous experience with a shipping, consumer product is a big plus.  The Square Panda team is fun-loving, quirky, and full of self-starters.  We are looking for someone who values working independently but with the support of a skilled and diverse group of individuals.  You should be motivated, can figure out what to do next when there is down-time, and want to have an impact on the world.

This position reports to the Director of Software Engineering, with important relationships to the the Product Team.

Responsibilities

• Participate in developing new, user-facing features
• Extend and improve our existing software
• Build reusable code and libraries for future use
• Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs
• Optimize application for maximum speed and scalability
• Assure that all user input is validated before submitting to back-end
• Debug issues and fix bugs
• Extend and improve product documentation
• Work collaboratively with other arms of the engineering team that are co-located in other countries

Minimum Qualifications

• Proficient understanding of web markup, including HTML5
• Proficient understanding of client-side scripting and JavaScript frameworks, including jQuery
• Proficient understanding of cross-browser compatibility issues and ways to work around them
• Experience creating webapps that support both traditional (desktop/laptop) and mobile browsers
• Good understanding of asynchronous request handling, partial page updates, and AJAX
• Basic understanding of REST APIs
• Basic knowledge of image authoring tools, to be able to crop, resize, or perform small adjustments on an image
• Strong software development skills such as:
  
  • experience with a source control system
  • experience with an issue tracking system
  • preliminary testing and verification of your own code
  • experience with the design and development life-cycle
  • knowledge of debugging and problem solving methodology, particularly as reported against Production software
• Excellent communication skills
• Willingness to document work in a wiki and track work through an issue tracking system
• 5+ years of software engineering experience
• BS in Computer Science or a related field and relevant experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous start-up experience
• Have worked on shipping product
• Additional skills that add value to our company (technical or domain)
• A passion for our product space and a desire to improve the lives of others