So what is this job, really?
At Bigfish, we don’t do "cookie-cutter." With 30 years of history, we’ve evolved from our creative arts roots into a versatile agency tackling projects in construction, education, and beyond. We are looking for a developer who can hit the ground running—someone who is equally comfortable architecting a fresh build as they are diving into a complex integration.
You’ll be split between two worlds: pushing the boundaries of our in-house headless CMS, Tank, and providing high-level support for our diverse catalog of existing client codebases.
At Bigfish we work across various industries from our roots in the creative arts to construction and education, there is always a new and exciting project on the horizon to come up with creative and maintainable solutions. A broad experience or willingness to experiment with technology and integrations would suit the role well. We commonly work with CRM's, marketing platforms (EDMs), interactive maps and a variety of 3rd party platforms (really anything our clients are using we will try and integrate for the best solution).
Our in-house CMS, Tank, is headless, which means we’re not limited to using any particular frontend framework. Currently we have a number of sites in NextJS, with our most recent projects using SvelteKit and Nuxt. If you have experience with a different frontend framework (e.g. Remix, Astro, etc..) we’re certainly open to hearing from you. BYO knowledge of CSS framework (but preferably Tailwind).
Naturally any website build is going to be closely tied to an understanding of how to work with a CMS (in our case Tank) so while a comprehensive understanding of the technologies listed in this post isn’t strictly required, it’s fair to say you’ll need to be able to show that you have the ability and drive to adapt and learn new things.
Tank is currently closed-source so you won’t be able to read up ahead of time but some of the technologies it has under the hood include:
Fastify, React, Prisma & Postgres, TailwindCSS, tRPC, Jotai, SocketIO, Docker, Vite and more.
Being around for 30+ years we have accumulated quite the catalog of projects. Experience in a PHP framework (Laravel, CakePHP) would be greatly beneficial in the support of our legacy sites. And like all things on the web, sudden server outages and hiccups do come around, so having the know how on troubleshooting and diagnosing issues would be highly favourable.
Actually Required Requirements
- Very solid understanding of HTML & CSS with an emphasis on semantics, responsiveness & accessibility.
- Experience as or working with a designer
- Solid understanding and strong appreciation for Typescript
- Solid understanding of a modern JS framework (React, Svelte, Vue)
- Git / source control
- Familiarity with an ORM
Requirements (but could be overlooked if you seem cool)
- NextJS, SvelteKit, Nuxt or another modern frontend framework
- Familiarity with a NodeJS backend framework (NestJS, Express, Fastify)
- Tailwind (or substantial knowledge of another CSS framework)
- Knowledge of how to navigate a terminal
- Understanding of hosting solutions and general server management
Nice to haves
Any kind of interactive frontend prowess - wow us
- Experience with PHP codebases (CakePHP, Laravel)
- CSS wizard 🪄🧙🏽♂️
- Animation experience
- WebGL / ThreeJS / Phaser experience
- Docker or Podman experience
- Experience with cloud hosting (we use AWS)
- Examples of meaningful open source contributions
Perks
- A close knit team of devs
- A variety of clients from various industries (arts, construction, health, education)
- Opportunity to contribute to an ever growing CMS & experiment with new technologies
- Work with an amazing team of designers to make gorgeous websites 👌
- Team camps & social events (with the occasional ice bath)
- Wellness room, lovingly known as the “Womb room”
- Dog friendly
- Weekly team quiz
- An office on the Brisbane river