Backend Developer | Nephila - Nephila Digital Agency

Hi there!

At Nephila we are always on the lookout for talented people, and pythonistas who are passionate about overcoming technological challenges. We’re now looking for a Backend Developer as a new team member.

You will have the opportunity to tackle some exciting team challenges that will put your skills to the test.

One such challenge involves extending a digital platform for publishing scholarly articles online. This is a two-year project for an international organization that publishes multiple scientific journals. You'll work closely with both Nephila and the client's internal team, collaborating with the open-source platform maintainer to adapt the platform to the client's specific needs. In this highly cooperative and open-minded environment, you'll be instrumental in extending the platform's features.

Another challenge is improving a web platform for teachers and students. This long-term project is for one of the largest school publishers in Italy. As part of the design and product teams, you'll collaborate with Nephila and the client's digital and editorial staff. You'll be part of an ecosystem of services managed by different vendors and providers, using various databases and APIs to provide data to frontend developers and other services. This is an opportunity to develop innovative solutions and features that will make a real difference in the education sector.

Here are some other things you might do, according to your seniority:

Work with teammates and partners, to understand requirements, and propose solutions.
Contribute to technological choices, and to the design or the improvements of the architecture of the projects you will work on.
Help keep documentation updated to help us become a better, more effective organisation.
Guide and mentor fellow Python developers.
Peer review teammates code, refactor and improve existing code keeping it on track with framework and techniques evolutions.

Our culture
We are based in Firenze, Italy. We are opensource oriented, agile and open-minded. We are proud Django and Python contributors, and we actively support diversity and inclusion in our communities. Even better, we are always eager to welcome teammates who are also community people, conference attendees and speakers.

We are a small, flexible and remote-first company; we are life-long learners, and each of us cares to grow and support each other as much as they cares to grow the whole organization.

We are proudly oriented to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce, and we celebrate our differences because we believe they will led us to be more innovative and to make even better products.

Our stack
As a company with strong technological mindset, we like to keep our daily tools at hand, and keep on-premise services for whatever we can handle ourselves. We strongly believe that untested code is a broken code, and we try to automate whatever we can. Our CI/CD infrastructure is there to catch errors and help us deploy our code quickly and effectively.

Our focus is on developing web applications with Python, and our stack is based on Django, Django REST Framework, django CMS and async frameworks like FastAPI.

We mostly use PostgreSQL, but we happen to interact with Oracle or MariaDB too.

Outside the relational world, we work with different systems like ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB, and any other service that might be needed to fulfill the client requirements.

When it comes to the infrastructure, we have a broad range of deployment scenarios, from plain server to managed Kubernetes clusters.

One more thing
Even it may seem like we’re looking for a specific candidate, the role ends up tailored to the person who applies and joins. And, several research works show that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply for roles if they don't meet all the requirements.

You can check our main criteria below and, regardless of how well you feel to fit our description, we encourage you to apply if you're interested. We'd love to know how you can amplify our team with your unique experience!

About you

You love building and shipping things.
You love building complex products with Python, to solve real customer problems, and you value building things fast matched with robustness.

- You have at least 3 years of experience working in web development;
- You have experience working with 3rd party APIs and libraries;
- You have a good grasp of Python and experience with working with Django or FastAPI;
- You have some familiarity with working with Docker and deploying in the cloud;
- You know that shipping is as much important as building, and you value your time and the ability to cooperate in the definition of a timeline with your teammates and the product team;
- You have some familiarity in analysing client requirements, estimate and propose solutions;
- You write understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability and scalability.

If you don't already know it, you're ready to learn it.
You enjoy analysing innovative trends, discover new technologies, see opportunities to improve a process, and getting deeper with the implementation details. You are good at Python, but you can explore whatever needed: frameworks, libraries, tools. You love to share your knowledge with your teammates, and you welcome feedbacks as an opportunity to sharpen your skills.

You value collaboration as much as coding.
You are definitely a team player, and know how to balance different demands within your group and towards other people. You understand that building modern applications is a team work, you are able to focus on performance and shared objectives, while helping teammates, whether by reviewing code, pairing on a tricky problem, or by thinking about solutions when challenges come ahead. You are happy to work in a supportive group of people that is constantly striving to improve itself in the delivery of high quality, robust solutions, and to bring your contribution to help everyone thrive.

You love to go deeper.
You know that working on the backend means getting a very good knowledge of the platform you are working on, understanding the domain and the context your solution will operate, and you earned from experience that technical decisions have far-reaching consequences.
As an engineer, you are always mindful to avoid technical debt and waste, and that your voice has a place in all phases of the software development process: from analysis, requirements, and design over implementation to test and release.

The Whole Package

Location: Remote
Our headquarters are in Firenze, Italy, but our flexible, distributed environment lets us work easily with remote people.

Languages: Italian, English
While our technical team members are comfortable with English, some proficency in Italian, as the shared language within Nephila and with Italian clients and partners, is a requirement.

Nephila offers:

32K - 38K Euro RAL (Gross Annual Income);
annual learning budget for courses, conferences, and more—for you own interests;
personal learning plan with dedicated annual budget and a growth path built together, to match your growth aligned with Nephila evolution;
access to public events and internal events or workshops organized by Nephila;
laptop and tools for your daily work;
personal presence in our Italian headquarters in Firenze can be occasionally required; accomodation and transport expenses are covered for non commuters;
job agreements and healthcare are provided as per the Italian "CCNL Commercio" law, unless other agreements can be considered in reason of specific requirements or conditions.

You can send us your CV to jobs@nephila.digital. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact us at the same email address.