Frontend Developer for Universities, Arts & Nonprofits

Job Description

Job Description

Who We Are

Cast Iron Coding is a web development agency in Portland, Oregon. We create web applications and websites for clients that spread knowledge and contribute to the common good. Most of our work is with universities, state governments, arts institutions, foundations, and other non-profits. Sometimes, when a project helps us sharpen our skills, we choose to work with for-profit, values-aligned companies.

We work with groups that tackle important problems, and we work hard to elevate the design and build quality on their projects. That's work we're proud of.

We're a team of eleven with strong retention. Most people stay longer than three years. We offer autonomy and a respectful, transparent, humanist management style. In return, we hold the team to high standards around integrity, collaboration, craft, and personal accountability.

What we Care About

As craftspeople, we care deeply about the quality of our work. We expect our designs to be honest, ethical, intelligent, user-centric, and joyous. We listen carefully to our clients, but we're not afraid to push them to bring their best effort to their projects. We resist and address head-on any constraints—unreasonable deadlines, poorly articulated requirements, insufficient resources—that prevent us from doing our best work. We pay particular attention to accessibility and user experience.

At Cast Iron, we seek profit for human ends, rather than for its own sake. In practice, that means we take work-life balance seriously and believe that maximizing employee well-being also maximizes the quality of our work. We care about employee growth, and offer professional development, advancement opportunities, regular goal setting, and mentoring. We take a deliberate approach to project management that aims to support our designers and developers without reducing them to issue-closing cogs in a machine. For twenty years we've been trying to build an agency that balances the needs of its owners, its clients, and its employees. It's a never-ending project, and one we're proud to still be working at.

How We Use AI

Our approach to AI is the same we take with any new tool: curiosity paired with skepticism. We ignore the hype and work out for ourselves what it's actually good at. Nearly everyone here uses AI coding assistants in their daily work, and they help us do more for our clients within their budgets. For the organizations we work with, that means more of their problems get solved with the money they have. They've also convinced us that, powerful as they are, they augment what remains a fundamentally human activity. Code is our medium, but underneath it are the human challenges of understanding a client's problem and designing an elegant and functional long-term solution. Every member of our team is expected to take full responsibility for the code they produce, whether they author it or an LLM does.

Who We're Looking for

Cast Iron is seeking a Frontend Web Developer with 1+ year of professional experience who can be a reliable and productive contributor under the oversight of the team lead and project manager. Our team is already strong on HTML, CSS, and UX, so we're especially interested in someone whose interests lean more back-of-the-frontend: application logic and architecture, data fetching, and deciding what renders on the server versus in the browser. You'll still write plenty of markup and styles, and we expect everyone's work to conform to accessibility guidelines. But you'll be well-suited for this role if you enjoy thinking about how an application is structured and where its data comes from.

We are open to a range of experience levels for this role, and are willing to mentor the right candidate who is less experienced but is driven and curious. Because we care about code readability, long-term maintenance, and your own growth, we'd generally rather you build something durable than something fast and disposable. But we're an agency doing work for hire, and every project has a budget. What we're really after is judgment: knowing where care pays off, where good enough is in fact good enough, and when to speak up because the budget and the right solution are in conflict.

We are also seeking someone who is interested in the whole process of creating software, not just taking tickets and shipping code. Success here isn't just measured in individual output. LLMs have crystallized for us that collaboration, curiosity, empathy, and abstract thinking remain essential to building good software. The right candidate is interested in asking questions and listening to clients as they articulate their challenges; in figuring out what the pieces of a solution are, how they flow together, and what they're called; and in putting themselves into the position of an end user, and asking, does this solve the problem? is it a pleasure to use?

What You'll Do

In this role, you will build user-facing web applications and traditional websites using Astro, TanStack/React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Tailwind, and other modern and emerging frontend technologies. You will collaborate with other frontend developers, backend developers, designers, project managers, and clients to bring to life interfaces that are beautiful and resilient, and that meet user needs and client goals. You'll be in meetings with those clients yourself, whether that's a university department, a state agency, or a museum's communications team. Knowledge of every framework and tool is not required; knowing the fundamentals of frontend development will get you a long way, and you'll pick up the rest along the way.

We also maintain a large portfolio of older projects that span a range of technologies, including Rails, Next.js, WordPress, and October CMS. Expect a mix of new builds and maintenance on projects that predate our current stack. In a typical month you'll bill time to six or seven different projects, usually a couple of active builds plus smaller maintenance work across our portfolio. It's a good role for someone who wants to be exposed to a wide range of technologies and clients rather than someone who wants to go deep on developing a single software product.

Requirements

Responsibilities

• Implement data fetching and state management in frontend applications, and make considered decisions about what renders on the server and what renders in the browser.
• Work with the server-side capabilities of frameworks like Astro and TanStack Start (routing, server functions, and caching, and deployment).
• Maintain and extend existing client projects, including sites built on older technologies.
• Work closely with designers to implement responsive interfaces from static designs and prototypes. Review designs in tools like Figma and provide implementation feedback to designers as needed.
• Produce user interfaces in semantic HTML, modern CSS, and JavaScript that meet WCAG accessibility guidelines.
• Work with data from GraphQL APIs. Communicate questions about API design and change requests to the backend team as needed.
• Conduct QA and accessibility testing during the development process and before launch.
• Review teammates' code and respond thoughtfully to review of your own.
• Communicate with clients in writing and in meetings to demonstrate progress and resolve implementation questions.
• Attend regular frontend team meetings to discuss team processes, practices, and tools.
• Estimate your own work and track it against the budget as a project progresses.
• Raise concerns early when a project's scope, budget, or timeline no longer fit the work.
• Manage tasks carefully in ClickUp and provide thoughtful, accurate updates and feedback to PMs and team lead.
• Be accountable to your teammates and treat them with kindness, respect, and empathy.

What Will Success Look Like?

• Teammates find you reliable and enjoy working with you.
• Clients report high satisfaction with the projects you work on.
• You deliver solutions that work, with some edge cases still to catch. Some support and revision from senior developers may be needed, depending on your experience level.
• You write code your teammates can pick up later, following industry best practices and our team conventions.
• You grow into general competence across the frontend and go deeper on back-of-the-frontend work.
• Over time, your estimates get more accurate and your work needs less rework.
• Projects you work on come in on time and on budget, and if they're not going to, you speak up.

Skills and Experience

Nobody has all of these, and we don't expect you to. Experienced developers will recognize a lot of this list; if you're earlier in your career, treat it as a description of what you'd be learning here. What matters more to us is that these are the things you want to become skilled at.

You should already have these:

• 1+ year working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Experience building an application with a JavaScript framework
• Strong written communication skills
• Curiosity about how an application is put together (where its data comes from, what happens on the server, why a page is structured the way it is)

You may have some of these, and you may develop others here. It helps if you've gotten started:

• Familiarity with the current JavaScript landscape including tooling, libraries, frameworks, and design patterns
• Experience with TypeScript, or interest in learning it
• Experience with server-side JavaScript and the server-rendering capabilities of frameworks like Astro, TanStack Start, or Next.js
• Comfort working in an application's data layer: queries, caching, loading and error states
• Familiarity with React
• Familiarity with GraphQL
• Some exposure to backend code, in any language, to have productive discussions with our backend team
• Familiarity with accessibility (considerations when writing HTML, CSS, and JS; WCAG guidelines; testing methods)
• Understanding of techniques for building robust, inclusive applications, such as progressive enhancement
• Experience working collaboratively with Git, including branching, rebasing, and resolving conflicts
• Experience with one or more content management systems, especially Craft, October, and WordPress
• Confidence working closely with client stakeholders

Benefits

The salary range for this position is $75,000 to $110,000. Where an offer lands within that range depends on experience: someone joining with a year or two would start near the bottom, and someone with three or four years near the top.

We offer 15 days of paid vacation and 8 days of PTO in your first year. We observe 8 paid holidays, and in recent years we've also closed the office for the week of Christmas and a day around Thanksgiving, for 13 or 14 paid days off. We contribute 50% toward health and dental coverage for you, your spouse, and your children, and 4% to a 401k retirement plan. New parents get 4 weeks of paid family leave, paid at a rate that depends on length of service.

We have a lovely office in Portland that you can work from. Employees who live in the Portland area work from the office on Wednesdays.

The Cast Iron leadership team will work to understand your personal and professional goals, and will help you reach them.

A Note on the Application Questions

Please write your answers yourself, without AI assistance. We use LLMs to help write code, not to write about ourselves. We're asking about your experience, and we want to hear it in your words. We'll talk through your answers if we meet.