Front end developer - HTML5, Sass, React

About Akvo

Akvo builds open source software which is designed to support international development aid to be more effective and transparent. We are a rapidly growing, entrepreneurial non-profit foundation with a big mission. Our tools are already positively disrupting the ways that development aid is allocated and reported in a sector that has been historically averse to change.

Our software services are backed by the partner team, responsible for managing support, training and sales. The partner team work from our head office in Amsterdam and also from our regional hubs around the world. The Akvo development team is distributed across Europe, India and West Africa.

Akvo has a participatory work culture and our highly collaborative teams have a strong sense of ownership of their tasks. Akvo is committed to a DevOps culture and an environment in which building, testing and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently and reliably. We work in an agile way, with the goal of constantly improving how we deliver working software. We are user centric and put great effort into understanding problems before deciding on solutions.

Akvo Flow, our data collection tool, consists of an Android app and a web-based platform which allows our users to create fully customisable surveys, manage survey teams and devices, and work with the data once submitted. Flow makes it simple to gather a variety of reliable, geographically referenced data offline, as well as making it possible to come back to previously collected data points and capture additional information. Over 4,7 million forms have been submitted with Flow across a variety of sectors, by development organisations and national governments.

Main tasks and responsibilities

You will be part of the Akvo Flow team and your main responsibilities will be in developing a new user interface for our survey designer tool and also developing and maintaining the online workspace in Flow. 

We are looking for someone with knowledge and experience in front-end development and with an instinct and drive for designing excellent user experiences, but we also expect you to be willing to learn and, now and then, to go outside of your main area of expertise. We strive to have autonomous, self reliant developer teams in Akvo, so be prepared to pair program with team mates, review code, deploy the product to production, discuss the systems architecture and chip in whenever the team needs more hands on deck.

Requirements and competencies:

• Five years of experience in front end development
• Strong HTML5, CSS/Sass skills
• Strong Javascript skills and experience
• Practical front end design skills and a keen eye for details
• An obsession with semantic markup 
• React.js • Experience in implementing, using and sticking to a CSS naming convention (such as BEM, NCSS, SUIT etc.)
• Affinity with the international development aid sector
• Able to work independently

Nice to haves:
• Experience with modern javascript frameworks
• Javascript build chain (webpack or other)
• Clojure or Clojurescript
• Ember.js
• Being part of large scale system development
• Test driven development
• Experience working in a team with devOps responsibilities
• Agile advocate and a believer in user and problem driven development


What we offer:
• A chance to work with tools that contribute to achieving higher efficiency and better results for the development aid sector
• Competence development consisting of bi-weekly learning sessions, conference allowance, developer book club, pair programming and daily knowledge sharing
• An opportunity to work with interesting technologies and challenges in a creative and entrepreneurial environment together with highly motivated colleagues
• Working full time on open source development. All Akvo’s products are open source and we are also strong proponents of open data.
• You will be a be part of our international Akvo community, with colleagues all over the world.
• A competitive salary in line with the market

This is a full time position based in Bangalore.

To apply for the position, please send portfolio links, your motivation letter and a resumé in PDF format to Lars Sjögreen at work[at]akvo.org before the 15th of October 2017.