Full Stack Engineer in Ashford

Location: Ashford, Kent (hybrid — 2–3 days on-site)

Team: Core Platform & AI Autolayout

PageSuite powers the digital editions and apps behind many of the world's best-known newspaper and magazine publishers, reaching millions of readers across web and mobile. As print deadlines tighten and print days shrink, we're building the tools that let publishers produce, lay out, and ship editions faster than ever - including an AI-driven automated layout engine that turns raw content feeds and ad plans into print-ready pages with no manual paste-up. You’ll work at the heart of that system: real, in-production AI features, demanding PDF/typesetting problems, and a modern TypeScript service architecture.

What you'll work on:

• The AI Autolayout Engine — automatically composing newspaper/magazine pages from content feeds and ad plans, with a scoring-and-branching system that searches for the best layout per page.
• A high-fidelity PDF rendering pipeline — text measurement, grid/flex layout resolution, image processing and smart cropping, all producing CMYK print-ready output that must match exactly across server and browser.
• A browser-based client render engine that mirrors backend rendering for instant editor feedback.
• The services and data layer behind it: ad plans, editions, templates, feeds, and a canonical article/slot store with concurrent-editing support.

Our stack:

• Language: TypeScript (strict), end to end
• Backend: Express 5, modular monolith of independently-deployed services sharing one PostgreSQL database; Zod for validation; InversifyJS for dependency injection; vertical-slice architecture
• Data: PostgreSQL (primary), DynamoDB (performance-critical paths)
• Frontend: React + Redux, TypeScript
• Rendering/Media: Puppeteer, Sharp
• AI/LLM: Anthropic Claude (model cascades, structured prompting) for content transformation, plus AWS Rekognition for image analysis
• Cloud: AWS — S3, SQS, Cognito, Step Functions, ALB; nginx routing
• Infra/Tooling: Docker Compose (local), IaC for AWS, Git

What we're looking for:

• Must have:
• Strong production TypeScript/JavaScript across both front-end (React/Redux or similar) and back-end (Node/Express or comparable API frameworks)
• Solid relational database experience (PostgreSQL) and comfort designing schemas and queries; bonus for NoSQL (DynamoDB)
• Real AWS experience (S3, queues, serverless/containers) and Docker
• Git, testing discipline, and CI/CD
• The ability to read into a large, unfamiliar codebase and ship safely — we value engineers who reduce complexity, not just add features

• Strongly desired — the differentiators:
• You work effectively with AI coding tools (Claude Code / Claude, Copilot, or similar) as a daily multiplier — you know how to prompt, review, and verify AI-generated code, and you understand its failure modes rather than trusting it blindly.
• Experience building with LLM APIs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, etc.): prompt design, model selection/cost trade-offs, structured outputs, fallbacks, and evaluating output quality.
• Exposure to document/PDF rendering, typography, layout algorithms, or computational geometry — anything involving measuring and placing content precisely.
• Event-driven / queue-based architectures (SQS, Step Functions) and an eye for performance (caching, parallelism).

• Nice to have:
• Publishing, print, CMS, or media-tech background
• Image processing (Sharp / ImageMagick), focal-point/crop work
• Kubernetes; AWS Step Functions; infrastructure-as-code

How we work:

We're a small, high-ownership team. You'll have direct input into architecture, you'll review and be reviewed, and you'll use modern AI tooling as a core part of the workflow — not a novelty. We care about clean, testable, well-documented code and about engineers who can reason about trade-offs out loud.

Why join:

Genuinely hard, genuinely interesting problems - AI layout, real-time rendering, print-grade output - used every day by major publishers, in a stack that's modern and a team where your decisions actually count.