Senior React Native Developer at SPYSCAPE

Highlights

• Exciting domain: Secrets, spies & superheroes

• Small, all-senior, fully-remote team with a lot of independence
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• Varied work with lots of opportunities to learn
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• Work/life balance - 37+ paid days off, open to flexible working
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• Multiple channels: digital and physical
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• James Bond - and Batman

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What we're building

SPYSCAPE is adding a suite of real-time / real-world mobile games to its experience line-up.

Right now we're preparing to launch a Batman tie-in - the player will communicate with characters from the DC Universe, advancing a storyline, then optionally visit the physical Batman exhibition at our New York HQ and play through a game that combines physical and app elements.

This is built around an inhouse engine, so we'll rapidly roll out other games.

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How we'll work together

Small team: We're a flat team of six senior developers, supported by a product owner, working from a single backlog.

Start together: We get together on Zoom each morning. This is quite informal, and we use it to discuss technical approaches, ask for help, arrange code reviews, talk about anything cool we just shipped, and figure out what the day's priorities are.

Focus time: After that we'll generally focus for the rest of the day, asking for help / ad-hoc pairing / code reviews over slack.

Small bites: We try to break things down into somewhere between a few hours and a few days' work, so that we merge frequently and nobody gets 'stuck' on a card.

Consensus: Larger tech decisions get broken out separately, on an "all welcome, all optional" basis. We generally make technical/architectural decisions by consensus. Sometimes we'll spike a couple of different approaches and do short presentations to the team about what we've learned.

Independence: High-level product direction and priorities come from our Product Owner, but we have a fair bit of flexibility as a team about how we implement them. This means that people can often choose what they want to work on. It also means that if you have cool ideas about what we can / should add to the experience to blow players' minds, they'll be very welcome (and you may end up building them).
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Cool stuff we've done recently

One of our games has a "magic camera" - a scripted NPC will ask you to take a photo of a particular prop inside the New York experience building, and then react differently based on whether you located and photographed the right one. We 3D-printed some test props, took some photos of them, used those to train the AI, and integrated it into the app.

As a team we figured out a way to synchronise the audio/video events in the HQ to the app as players walk through, using a Raspberry PI as a configurable iBeacon.

We modified one of our interactive exhibits to broadcast a proposal in 6-foot-high letters across an entire wall of the codebreaking room, at exactly the right moment. (She said yes!)

We got the team together in London for a few days, attended React Advanced, and played an escape room together (we're an experience company, it's research..)

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Are you who we're looking for?

We're all very experienced full-stack generalists. We're looking for someone with specific knowledge of the quirks of mobile development. Our first question will be "show us some mobile apps you've taken from whiteboard to production".

In more detail, we'll be looking for:

Technical

• Experience in taking mobile apps from concept to production using React Native
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• Strong javascript skills (ideally typescript)
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• Knowledge of current mobile best-practice on both iOS and Android

Cultural‍

• Interest in spies, games, stories, immersive experiences, and/or helping people uncover their hidden skills

• Desire to work in a small, independent tech team, across a variety of projects, within a fast-moving business
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Nice to have

• Skills in mobile-native code (Swift and/or Kotlin)

The details

• Permanent, full-time role, start as soon as you're ready.
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• Fully remote, any location, UK time zone. We get together as a team a few times a year, but these are optional.
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• Competitive salary depending on your skills; we'd also potentially be open to a mid-level hire if it's a good fit. £60-80+k is an indicative range.

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In your first X, you'll probably...

• Day: get your dev environment up and running (our READMEs are up to date, shouldn't be many gotchas), play through the game as it stands, and pick up your first card (likely a small one)
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• Week: have a quick chat with the team about your proposed implementation for that card, implement it, make any changes you feel are justified after a code review, and merge it
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• Month: start contributing to technical discussions for larger cards - is this permission flow still best-practice? will this ibeacon implementation work cleanly on older Android devices, and is there a better way? Would this minigame be more fun if we did it like this?
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• Year: write a lot of really high-quality RN code, see a lot of people having fun with it in our HQ and around the world, and (if you want) learn a bunch of other technologies from terraform to electronics

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Everyone is welcome

• We aim to maintain an inclusive and diverse environment, and welcome applications from everyone, especially groups who are underrepresented in our industry.
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• We’re also happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, and to make reasonable accommodations for individual needs.

Next steps

• Drop Gwyn an email at developerhiring@spyscape.com, or fill in the web form below.
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• If you'd like to have an informal chat about the role, or have some questions you need answered before you apply, that's also fine.
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• Our hiring process respects your time; we’ll have a quick screening call, a more detailed interview in which we’ll ask you to walk us through some of your code, and finally a chat with our CEO.

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More about Spyscape

SPYSCAPE, the home of secrets & skills, uses stories & experiences to inspire ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  We all have valuable ‘intelligence skills’, and from our 70,000 sq ft physical HQ (the #1 rated museum & experience in New York City) to our digital content and experiences, we help you to discover & develop yours.
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In the physical world, SPYSCAPE HQ in New York City is the number one ranked new museum & experience on Google and TripAdvisor. It features seven core experiential zones, plus a huge temporary space that currently features the first ever James Bond exhibition in the USA.
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In the digital world: Our SPYCRAFT content includes authentic online spy skills assessments designed by a former Head of Training at British Intelligence, plus related articles, puzzles and videos; our True Spies podcasts (with hosts Hayley Atwell and Vanessa Kirby) provide unique insights into the world of espionage; Our SPYCON live events platform and the second edition of our SPYFLIX film festival, plus numerous other exciting new initiatives, will launch in the coming months.