The Position
The engineering team at GFW is in charge of processing the raw data and making it publicly and freely available through various products to different audiences. These products include data hosted in public Google BigQuery datasets, public APIs, and interactive web-based front-end tools. The front-end products seek to make complex geo-temporal data accessible to users with no data science or data engineering backgrounds while making sure that people with mid-level computers and slow internet connections can access them.
Global Fishing Watch is looking to add a front-end developer to its front-end team to be able to boost the production, improvement and maintenance of its front-end products. In the past few years they have expanded their user base significantly and the digital product team continuously research their needs which brings new requirements and issues that are found while using their front-end products. While implementing this requirements and fixing issues they look to reduce technical-debt and keep the core infrastructure up do date with latest technologies, making our products be more stable, robust and easy to maintain, as an example of this they migrated their map from using Mapbox stack to use Deck-GL what is enabling them to do several new kinds of visualizations and reducing the load on users CPUs. Also, GFW research team is always creating new knowledge, with this comes the challenges of visualizing data that has never showed before and making it readable and useful.
What You Will be Working on:
- Interactive maps showing vessel tracks, fishing activity heatmaps, encounters in high seas, etc., through time; Our main map is the entry point to our data, allowing users to do deep analysis without the need of coding or accessing/downloading the data.
- Interactive Graphs and Reports used to analyze vessel activity and identify illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and related activities;
- Tools for users to display and analyze their own datasets alongside GFW’s datasets;
- Interactive articles (i.e., “scrollytelling”) and other pieces to highlight our research team’s work (papers);
- Internal tools to help collect and classify satellite data;
- A wide variety of proof of concepts, experimental mapping work, etc.
Principal Duties and Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain front-end products to visualize GFW datasets using the latest standards and best practices;
- Build products with a focus on performance, responsiveness and cross-browser testing, as our users are diverse and operate on a diverse set of equipment and connectivity;
- Review wireframes and visual designs created by our UX designer, and requirements by the functional analyst; ask any necessary clarifying questions before starting on work.
- Write code to implement components that will be used with various web applications;
- Create prototypes, mockups, and staging sites for review and feedback;
- Understand distinct user needs, and strive to deliver high quality web applications for each user group;
- Diagnose and solve complex problems, whether conceptual problems, bugs or performance issues;
- Work jointly with the QA area; write unit and end-to-end tests; help the team level-up their testing skills;
- Write clear code and documentation allowing the easy interpretation of other members of the team;
- Publish internally developed tools as open-source projects;
- Review the technical design and perform code review of other developers’ work. Help improve the developer experience;
- Help choose the right technology stack for the next-generation data platform. Be curious, never settle.
Candidate description
Required technical skills
- Substantial experience with React (or similar UI framework), and Redux (or similar app state management libraries);
- Solid grasp of the modern web platform and how browsers work, experience with cross-device and cross-browser development (desktop and mobile);
- Ability to interpret, challenge, and faithfully implement designs;
- Implementing meaningful End-to-end and unit testing (any test frameworks);
- Comfortable with Git and knowledge of different branching strategies for development;
- Experience with DeckGL;
- Experience consuming APIs securely;
Preferred technical skills
- Experience with complex app state management and interconnectivity to react to UI changes.
- Experience with GPU programming, WebGL, shaders;
- Experience with data visualization specific challenges and libraries (D3); grasp of basic statistics concepts;
- Experience with maps, QGIS or similar, any web mapping stack (Leaflet, Mapbox GL) as well as more theoretical aspects of web maps: projections, file formats, tiles, vector tiles, etc.
- CI/CD environments;
- Open-source collaboration experience.
Required Communication skills
- Strong communication skills to effectively collaborate with designers, developers, and other relevant staff members or clients;
- Team player, willing to work with, teach and learn from the GFW team;
- Proactive mindset—enjoys and exhibits a high degree of ownership of tasks and projects;
- Comfortable working in a small but fast-growing team;
- High proficiency in English;
- Excellent communication skills—in person, phone, and, most important, written;
- Comfortable communicating with a wide range of individuals, including peers, juniors and senior-level people;
- Intellectually curious, forward-thinking, willing to suggest/try new technologies and creative approaches to problems;
- Flexibility to adapt to changing instructions and requirements;
- Ability to manage multiple projects and meet deadlines;
- Experience working remotely.
