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Front-End Engineer, Defence (Contract)

Improbable has created SpatialOS: a networking solution combining low latency, tools for faster iteration, and a ready-to-go architecture capable of supporting innovative games.

Now the Improbable Defence division, building on the backbone of SpatialOS, has combined world class scientific modelling, market leading AI, mission specific user interfaces and a uniquely flexible and secure deployment model to create a powerful simulation platform tailored to the needs of the military.

Our mission? To enable the most realistic and effective military simulations ever experienced, making defence users more effective on operations and decreasing the cost of military preparedness.

will be to join a growing team, with immediate opportunity for impact, on a brand new platform for decision making and virtual training.

You will be building a new class of application, critical to the Improbable Defence vision. Your users will be key allies in the western world using our platform to dramatically increase the capabilities for planning and decision making. We use the power of simulation and probabilistic modelling to address the threats of the modern world.

You will have the opportunity to design, build, and iterate on our greenfield single page web applications. You will be expected to work alongside our product managers and designers and contribute to the feedback process for our product from its earliest point. We are leveraging a modern stack including TypeScript, React, gRPC, and Styled Components on our first large product.

You will help pioneer techniques for simulation planning, simulation playback, turn-based wargaming, and much more. While a lot of the work will focus on the front-end web technologies, in the future there may be work required on our back-end supporting services.

As a team we strive to balance how we build, such that we can move quickly and adapt to change, whilst building a robust and performant product. To facilitate this, we invest heavily in a reusable component library.

Whilst as a team we don’t yet own any backend services we work very closely with the teams that do, often with an internal open source model of contributing where needed.

Areas for Impact

• Building a highly configurable, high performant product, connecting multiples of users in a reliable fashion.
• System design allowing for performant geospatial data rendering and analysis; we’re taking cutting edge mapping data, and complex geospatial models and allowing decision makers in government to interact with them.
• Working in a cross-functional team of designers, UX researchers, product designers, and engineers to build highly customisable, intuitive applications
• Writing scalable and reusable components in Typescript and React for others engineers to adapt and use as our customer base expands
• You will be a central part of delivering a strategic project for the UK government, growing to own parts of our core offering and expanding it to become a core platform offering.
• Interpersonal interaction with users, to deliver a radically new application that will rapidly change the nature of wargaming and course-of-action experimenting for a new generation of tacticians and commanders
• Examples of work that we've done in the past can be found on our engineering blog here: https://improbable.io/blog/grpc-web-moving-past-restjson-towards-type-safe-web-apis

We'd like to hear from you if you identify with the following:

• Skilled with TypeScript or JavaScript (you will be supported in learning TypeScript if you do not know it)
• Fluency with React (or similar libraries/frameworks like Vue or Angular) on data-intensive web applications
• Experience building customisable single page web applications (bonus points if they were for configurable for multiple customers)
• Experience working on high performance web applications, or a background in Computer Science.
• You’re considerate, humble, and a strong believer in teamwork.
• Read more in our briefing pack here

The best ideas are often the least expected and require new ways of thinking; that’s why our teams at Improbable are made up of an incredible range of talented people. Improbable is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, colour, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any other legally protected status.