Role summary
We are seeking a Senior Frontend Software Engineer to help develop and modernize the E! Online web platform. This engineer will work on a high-traffic, server-rendered React application supporting news, articles, galleries, video, live streams, advertising, analytics, international editions, and SEO-sensitive content experiences.
About the role
E! Online is a major entertainment news site, server-rendered with React and GraphQL. Its web platform serves articles, galleries, video, show pages and AMP across US and international editions.
The ideal candidate will own the server-rendered React platform behind E! Online. We are modernizing the architecture and tech stake for E! Online, and building the engineering practices around it. Delivering reliable product enhancements. The ideal candidate is comfortable improving an established production codebase incrementally—not only building greenfield applications.
It is a large, real codebase with a heavy third-party surface — ads, video, analytics and consent run on every page. Some of what sits underneath is older than we would like, and modernizing it is part of the job, not a side project.
What you'll bring
- 5+ years building production web applications in JavaScript, at least 3 of them with React.
- Deep, practical knowledge of server-side rendering and hydration. You can explain why a hydration mismatch happens, how React 18 recovers from one, and how to find the component responsible.
- Experience running a server-rendered React application in production at meaningful traffic.
- Working knowledge of GraphQL and a normalized client cache such as Apollo's.
- Strong testing habits: component tests with React Testing Library or similar, plus end-to-end tests.
- Comfort in a large existing codebase — reading unfamiliar code, tracing where something is used before you change it, and improving things incrementally.
- An evidence-first way of working. You check a claim before you make it, and you say what you verified.
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain customer-facing features across E! Online.
- Help execute the React 16 → React 18.3 → React 19 modernization roadmap.
- Upgrade React-facing dependencies, including Apollo Client, Helmet, intersection observers, and UI libraries.
- Maintain server-side rendering and browser hydration behavior.
- Diagnose and resolve hydration mismatches, rendering failures, race conditions, and browser-specific issues.
- Build regression coverage for critical routes and user journeys.
- Maintain GraphQL queries and Apollo Client cache behavior.
- Develop and support article, gallery, video, livestream, navigation, poll, newsletter, and CMS-driven experiences.
- Integrate and troubleshoot advertising, consent, analytics, and third-party services.
- Protect SEO requirements, including metadata, canonical URLs, social tags, structured data, and server-rendered content.
- Improve accessibility, performance, resilience, and Core Web Vitals.
- Write clear unit, integration, hydration, and browser tests.
- Review pull requests and identify functional, regression, security, and maintainability risks.
- Participate in production support, root-cause analysis, and incident follow-up.
- Create technical documentation and communicate implementation decisions to engineers and stakeholders.
- Work closely with product, design, QA, CMS, platform, advertising, analytics, and release-engineering teams.
Required qualifications
- Strong professional experience developing production React applications.
- Advanced JavaScript, HTML, and CSS skills.
- Experience working with hooks, context, component lifecycles, and error boundaries.
- Experience with server-rendered React applications or similar SSR frameworks.
- Strong understanding of hydration and server/browser rendering differences.
- Experience with GraphQL and client-side caching.
- Demonstrated ability to write behavior-focused tests with React Testing Library.
- Experience diagnosing difficult production issues involving state, asynchronous behavior, APIs, or third-party integrations.
- Ability to modernize legacy code incrementally while controlling regression risk.
- Strong Git and pull-request review practices.
- Ability to communicate technical risks and tradeoffs clearly.
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across teams.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience migrating a large application between major React versions.
- Experience with media, publishing, entertainment, or other content-heavy platforms.
- Familiarity with video players, live streaming, playlists, and advertising integrations.
- Experience with Apollo cache normalization and SSR cache hydration.
- Knowledge of technical SEO and structured metadata.
- Familiarity with OneTrust or other consent-management platforms.
- Experience with Adobe analytics, data layers, or comparable analytics systems.
- Experience supporting internationalized websites.
- Familiarity with accessibility standards such as WCAG.
- Experience with high-traffic, revenue-generating consumer applications.
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