Portland, Oregon, United States · Hybrid
$75k–$110k/yr
Who We Are Cast Iron Coding is a web development agency in Portland, Oregon. We create web applications and websites for clients that spread knowledge and contribute to the common good. Most of our work is with universit…
Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, React
Portland, Oregon, United States • Hybrid
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You will build and maintain user-facing web applications using modern frontend technologies while collaborating with cross-functional teams. Responsibilities include implementing data fetching, ensuring accessibility compliance, and communicating directly with clients to resolve project requirements.
The role requires at least one year of professional experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with experience building applications using a JavaScript framework. Candidates should possess strong written communication skills and a curiosity for application architecture and server-side rendering.
Cast Iron Coding is a web development agency in Portland, Oregon. We create web applications and websites for clients that spread knowledge and contribute to the common good. Most of our work is with universities, state governments, arts institutions, foundations, and other non-profits. Sometimes, when a project helps us sharpen our skills, we choose to work with for-profit, values-aligned companies.
We work with groups that tackle important problems, and we work hard to elevate the design and build quality on their projects. That's work we're proud of.
We're a team of eleven with strong retention. Most people stay longer than three years. We offer autonomy and a respectful, transparent, humanist management style. In return, we hold the team to high standards around integrity, collaboration, craft, and personal accountability.
What we Care AboutAs craftspeople, we care deeply about the quality of our work. We expect our designs to be honest, ethical, intelligent, user-centric, and joyous. We listen carefully to our clients, but we're not afraid to push them to bring their best effort to their projects. We resist and address head-on any constraints—unreasonable deadlines, poorly articulated requirements, insufficient resources—that prevent us from doing our best work. We pay particular attention to accessibility and user experience.
At Cast Iron, we seek profit for human ends, rather than for its own sake. In practice, that means we take work-life balance seriously and believe that maximizing employee well-being also maximizes the quality of our work. We care about employee growth, and offer professional development, advancement opportunities, regular goal setting, and mentoring. We take a deliberate approach to project management that aims to support our designers and developers without reducing them to issue-closing cogs in a machine. For twenty years we've been trying to build an agency that balances the needs of its owners, its clients, and its employees. It's a never-ending project, and one we're proud to still be working at.
How We Use AIOur approach to AI is the same we take with any new tool: curiosity paired with skepticism. We ignore the hype and work out for ourselves what it's actually good at. Nearly everyone here uses AI coding assistants in their daily work, and they help us do more for our clients within their budgets. For the organizations we work with, that means more of their problems get solved with the money they have. They've also convinced us that, powerful as they are, they augment what remains a fundamentally human activity. Code is our medium, but underneath it are the human challenges of understanding a client's problem and designing an elegant and functional long-term solution. Every member of our team is expected to take full responsibility for the code they produce, whether they author it or an LLM does.
Who We're Looking forCast Iron is seeking a Frontend Web Developer with 1+ year of professional experience who can be a reliable and productive contributor under the oversight of the team lead and project manager. Our team is already strong on HTML, CSS, and UX, so we're especially interested in someone whose interests lean more back-of-the-frontend: application logic and architecture, data fetching, and deciding what renders on the server versus in the browser. You'll still write plenty of markup and styles, and we expect everyone's work to conform to accessibility guidelines. But you'll be well-suited for this role if you enjoy thinking about how an application is structured and where its data comes from.
We are open to a range of experience levels for this role, and are willing to mentor the right candidate who is less experienced but is driven and curious. Because we care about code readability, long-term maintenance, and your own growth, we'd generally rather you build something durable than something fast and disposable. But we're an agency doing work for hire, and every project has a budget. What we're really after is judgment: knowing where care pays off, where good enough is in fact good enough, and when to speak up because the budget and the right solution are in conflict.
We are also seeking someone who is interested in the whole process of creating software, not just taking tickets and shipping code. Success here isn't just measured in individual output. LLMs have crystallized for us that collaboration, curiosity, empathy, and abstract thinking remain essential to building good software. The right candidate is interested in asking questions and listening to clients as they articulate their challenges; in figuring out what the pieces of a solution are, how they flow together, and what they're called; and in putting themselves into the position of an end user, and asking, does this solve the problem? is it a pleasure to use?
What You'll DoIn this role, you will build user-facing web applications and traditional websites using Astro, TanStack/React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Tailwind, and other modern and emerging frontend technologies. You will collaborate with other frontend developers, backend developers, designers, project managers, and clients to bring to life interfaces that are beautiful and resilient, and that meet user needs and client goals. You'll be in meetings with those clients yourself, whether that's a university department, a state agency, or a museum's communications team. Knowledge of every framework and tool is not required; knowing the fundamentals of frontend development will get you a long way, and you'll pick up the rest along the way.
We also maintain a large portfolio of older projects that span a range of technologies, including Rails, Next.js, WordPress, and October CMS. Expect a mix of new builds and maintenance on projects that predate our current stack. In a typical month you'll bill time to six or seven different projects, usually a couple of active builds plus smaller maintenance work across our portfolio. It's a good role for someone who wants to be exposed to a wide range of technologies and clients rather than someone who wants to go deep on developing a single software product.
ResponsibilitiesNobody has all of these, and we don't expect you to. Experienced developers will recognize a lot of this list; if you're earlier in your career, treat it as a description of what you'd be learning here. What matters more to us is that these are the things you want to become skilled at.
You should already have these:
You may have some of these, and you may develop others here. It helps if you've gotten started:
The salary range for this position is $75,000 to $110,000. Where an offer lands within that range depends on experience: someone joining with a year or two would start near the bottom, and someone with three or four years near the top.
We offer 15 days of paid vacation and 8 days of PTO in your first year. We observe 8 paid holidays, and in recent years we've also closed the office for the week of Christmas and a day around Thanksgiving, for 13 or 14 paid days off. We contribute 50% toward health and dental coverage for you, your spouse, and your children, and 4% to a 401k retirement plan. New parents get 4 weeks of paid family leave, paid at a rate that depends on length of service.
We have a lovely office in Portland that you can work from. Employees who live in the Portland area work from the office on Wednesdays.
The Cast Iron leadership team will work to understand your personal and professional goals, and will help you reach them.
A Note on the Application QuestionsPlease write your answers yourself, without AI assistance. We use LLMs to help write code, not to write about ourselves. We're asking about your experience, and we want to hear it in your words. We'll talk through your answers if we meet.
We work with smart, mission-driven clients to reliably deliver beautiful, ambitious software their users love.
Cast Iron Coding works with smart, mission-driven clients to reliably deliver beautiful, ambitious software their users love.
Offices: 1300 SE Stark St, Suite 307, Portland, Oregon 97214, US
We work with smart, mission-driven clients to reliably deliver beautiful, ambitious software their users love.
Cast Iron Coding works with smart, mission-driven clients to reliably deliver beautiful, ambitious software their users love.
Offices: 1300 SE Stark St, Suite 307, Portland, Oregon 97214, US
