Email Client Application Developer

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Melbourne, Australia

We’re looking for an Email Client Application developer to join the Fastmail team in our Melbourne CBD office.

About the Job

Together with the rest of our team, you’ll work on our email services Fastmail, Pobox, and Topicbox. When the vast majority of people get email for free, the reason people choose a paid service is because they value both privacy and a great user experience.

You’ll be working on our best-in-breed mail clients, providing super-fast, powerful access to webmail, calendars, contacts and more. You’ll work with our collaborative team of front- and back-end developers, designers and researchers. Improving our customers’ interactive experience, keeping it secure and a delight to use is what we do, every day.

Our interfaces are built upon our own Overture framework and the new email standard JMAP. It gives us full control from top to bottom to build the right solutions to difficult problems. If you’ve worked with other MVC application frameworks, like Apple’s Cocoa, you should find Overture easy to pick up.

You’ll have the opportunity to work at many levels:

There’s always an interesting new challenge to solve!

About You

You have a strong grasp of the problems of building client/server applications, especially at the client end, where a user interface has to stay responsive while interacting with a sometimes-wayward server. You’ve got to handle data from third parties that often doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you can’t just crash. The network isn’t reliable, latency is non-zero, and every missed data binding means one more bizarre state that the interface can enter.

You understand that development is more than just coding. It’s requirements analysis, documentation (your future self will thank you), testing, and support. You’ve participated in user testing (or would really love to add it to your skill set), and you know the best feedback you can get is seeing how real people use your work.

You strive to find root causes and apply the fix at the right level of the stack, rather than applying an ever more unmaintainable series of band-aid hacks on top. You delight in an elegant solution, especially if it makes the user’s experience faster. We take pride in the little details, and we hope you do too.

Our client is built on the Web platform, so you’ll need to have a great handle on ECMAScript, HTML, CSS, client-side storage and worker APIs, and the various security and performance issues specific to that platform.

You have excellent written language skills, strong verbal and interpersonal skills, patience, diligence, and an ability to gracefully adapt to change. You love engaging with your colleagues to find the ideal implementation solution.

Working at Fastmail

If you come and work with us, you'll be working at our office in Melbourne, Australia.

We have an office in Philadelphia, USA, and we're in close communication with them. Because of the time difference, this means a lot of email, a fair bit of Slack chat, and occasional video chats. This means that occasionally you might need to be available outside normal business hours for a team meeting.

We encourage employees to write and speak about the great work we do, and we value people who are enthusiastic to learn and improve their skills -- and we give them a conference budget to do so. Many staffers write articles on our blog, and we hope you will, too. Several staff members are regular conference speakers.

You can read about our values, and our blog contains interviews with some of the people who will become your colleagues at Fastmail.

Like everyone on our team, you'll get good benefits (such as paid parental leave) and 4 weeks annual leave. We'll set you up with equipment, books, and whatever else you need to do your job comfortably.

We see this as a full-time role with a high face-to-face communication component, so you'll be required to spend most of your work-time physically present in our Melbourne office. There's flexibility in that though - we are partners, parents and carers ourselves, and we understand time-zone flexibility goes in both directions. Talk to us if you're unsure.

We welcome all applicants regardless of race, colour, religion, age, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, disability, or sexual orientation.

About the only thing we can't help with is visas or sponsorship. You must already have the right to work in Australia.

Sounds great, what’s next?

Email us at jobs@fastmail.com to introduce yourself and tell us why you would be a good fit for the job! This job requires clear communication, so that message is part of your application, but please also include a PDF of your resume. We’d also love to hear about your work to date: please share what apps you have worked on so far.

Job Type: Full-time.