Verndale is a digital experience agency dedicated to driving growth by helping businesses create meaningful human connections in an increasingly digital world. With offices in Boston, Montreal, Los Angeles, Quito, and hubs across the Americas, we partner with marketing and technology leaders to deliver personalized web, mobile, and ecommerce solutions that elevate customer experiences. 

At Verndale, we thrive on collaboration and innovation, offering a full range of services that span strategy, design, development, personalization, SEO, analytics, and digital advertising. We celebrate diversity and inclusion, striving to create a climate of respect essential for both individual and company success.

If you're ready to be part of a passionate team dedicated to making an impact and driving growth, we invite you to explore a career at Verndale. 

About the role

The Front-End Architect role is a mix of technical adviser, team leader, coder, and evangelist. On a project the Front-End Architect is responsible for all front-end tasks including estimation, requirements gathering, advising, overseeing other developers, and directing the implementation. Within the department the Front End Architect works with the Director of Front End and other Architects to push the team towards the latest tools, technologies, and best practices. Strong technical ability in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and effective organization and communication skills is a must.

Responsibilities

• Be capable of taking on any size and complexity of project.
• Be able to manage multiple projects and responsibilities in a fast-paced environment.
• Work closely with other departments, team members, vendors, and clients
• Collaborate with experience architects to validate prototypes meet conditions of the project and suggest improvements or changes as needed.
• Collaborate with experience designers to validate designs meet conditions of the project and suggest improvements or changes as needed.
• Collaborate with technical architects and back-end engineers to determine technical requirements and implementation approaches for the project.
• Work with clients to define and understand requirements and to resolve issues or questions during development.
• Work with vendors to understand their systems and integrations and how it will impact our projects.
• Estimation:
• • Continually update front end estimates throughout the project life cycle.
  • Capture and continually update all assumptions used to create estimations.
• Team Oversight
• • Oversee and mentor front end engineers on the project.
  • Conduct code reviews and provide feedback and guidance to developers based on the code.
  • Assign out tasks to team members effectively.
  • Manage team members - this includes 1:1's as well as career paths, quarterly reviews and performance reviews.
• Department Contributions
• • Evaluate frameworks, technologies and tools and determine their relevance to a particular project or the wider department.
  • Help drive department standards and best practices.
• Project Responsibilities
• • Ensure all front-end aspects of projects proceed efficiently, predictably and on time.
  • Review the statement of work, functional spec, and other documents to understand the project goals and front-end specifics such as: hours sold, timeline, browser support, coding standards, framework requirements, etc.
  • Participate in requirements gathering and validation.
  • Create technical documentation for front end aspects of the project.
  • Identify and raise potential project risks to the team and help to alleviate those risks.
  • Architect and write front end code for the foundation and complex features of each project and set establish API endpoints.
  • Perform smoke tests on various devices and browsers.

Qualifications

• At least 5 or more years of software development experience using an object oriented programming language, preferably Javascript, but other backgrounds are considered.
• At least 3 or more years of experience creating responsive experiences using SASS/LESS/PostCSS and semantic HTML5.
• At least 2 to 3 years' experience leading a team of engineers on mid to large scale projects.
• Strong development fundamentals including clean, reusable code.
• Strong Expertise with front-end technologies: JavaScript (ES6), React, Webpack, Babel, HTML5, CSS/SASS
• At least 1 year of working with an Agile/SCRUM workflow.
• At least 1 year experience using Git and git-flow.
• Agency experience
• Attention to detail. Be able to replicate provided designs and meet all functional requirements of the project.

Ten Great Reasons to Work at Verndale

1. We are a rapidly growing company that is just as scrappy and entrepreneurial today as when we were founded in 1998.
2. We are relentlessly curious and enthusiastically solve our clients’ complex business problems through technology, data, and design.
3. We foster a culture that enables every person in the organization to do the best work of their career.
4. We offer regular training and professional development to move careers forward.
5. Client and employee satisfaction are our two most important business metrics.
6. We celebrate and champion diversity, equity, and inclusion.
7. We offer generous paid company holidays, vacation, and paid sick time to every employee starting on day one.
8. We offer top-of-the-line Health Insurance, plus monthly perks customized to meet individual employees’ needs. 
9. We support a healthy work/life balance.
10. We are fully remote enabled and embrace the evolving definition of the workplace