Senior JavaScript Engineer

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About the Role:

We're hiring a Senior JavaScript Engineer to help shape the technical direction of Research Exchange Review (Phenom Review), Wiley's peer review platform where editors, reviewers, and editorial staff take manuscripts from editor assignment to editorial decision. You'll lead the design and delivery of complex features across a distributed, event-driven system. You'll raise the bar on reliability, observability, and engineering quality, and mentor engineers across the team.

About the Team and Product:

Review is part of Wiley's Research Exchange (ReX) platform. It is the step manuscripts reach after screening: they are triaged and assigned to a handling editor, sent out to reviewers, revised by authors, and taken to a decision before moving on to quality checks and production.

We support thousands of manuscripts and many users with different editorial roles, across areas such as:

• •Journal setup, editorial boards, and role management (chief, associate, section, academic, and guest editors)
• •Configurable editorial models, from single-tier to two-tier triage and special issue workflows
• •Editor and reviewer suggestions, invitations, and reviewer reports
• •Author revisions, editor recommendations, and editorial decisions
• •Peer review integrity signals, such as conflicts of interest and reviewer misconduct

Review runs as a core application in a monorepo, alongside supporting services such as the flexible editorial models engine, editor and reviewer suggestion, and user sync with Wiley's Connect identity platform. The platform is multi-tenant by design, so different journal portfolios can run with their own configuration.

The platform is growing in three directions at once: more of Wiley's journal portfolio moving onto ReX, more configurable peer review workflows per journal, and a modernized codebase. Getting the architecture, workflow configurability, and operations right is central to this role.

Role Overview:

You'll be a technical leader in the team. You'll turn ambiguous product goals into clear technical designs, make and document architectural decisions, and lead complex work from start to finish. You'll work closely with engineering managers, architects, product, and QA. Your job is to make sure what we build is scalable, secure, and easy to run in production.

What You’ll Work On

• •Architecture and evolution of the Review platform (core application, supporting services, event flows), including the gradual move of new modules to NestJS
• •Flexible editorial models: configurable workflows, roles, and decision rights per journal, from single-tier to two-tier and special issue models
• •Editor and reviewer matching and invitation flows, including areas of expertise and user data from Wiley's Connect platform
• •Integrations with other ReX/Phenom systems (Submission, Screening, Quality Checks, Production) and with Wiley identity and data platforms
• •Front-end modernisation: moving the Review UI to the new ReX design identity and shared component library, and removing custom styling
• •Platform reliability: queue health, failed-message reduction, job metrics, alerting, tracing, and incident readiness

Key Responsibilities

• •Lead the technical design of complex features and write technical design documents and architecture decision records
• •Own end-to-end delivery of large initiatives, breaking them into increments the team can ship
• •Design solid event-driven flows: event contracts, versioning, duplicate-safe processing, retries, failed-message handling, and replay
• •Design for multi-tenancy, security, and access control (authentication, role-based permissions across editorial roles, protection of confidential peer review data)
• •Improve performance and reliability across Node.js services, PostgreSQL, and queue processing
• •Drive observability standards (structured logging, OpenTelemetry tracing, Prometheus metrics, Grafana alerts) and reduce operational noise
• •Set and model engineering standards: code quality, testing strategy (unit, integration, contract), test coverage tracking, and CI/CD practices
• •Work with QA to make the system easy to test and to keep end-to-end automation stable and fast
• •Review designs and code across the team, and mentor mid-level and junior engineers
• •Lead or support incident response and run blameless post-incident reviews
• •Work with architects and other Phenom/ReX teams on cross-team dependencies and shared platform decisions
• •Help with hiring, interviews, and onboarding

Technical Environment

• •Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript
• •Backend: Node.js, Express, Apollo GraphQL, NestJS (new modules)
• •Frontend: React, Ant Design-based Phenom UI component library
• •Database: PostgreSQL
• •Messaging / events: AWS SNS/SQS event bus, shared event schemas (phenom-types)
• •Storage: AWS S3
• •Auth: Keycloak (JWT/OIDC)
• •Testing: Jest, Cypress / Playwright
• •Observability: Prometheus metrics, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, AWS CloudWatch alarms
• •Tooling & infra: pnpm workspaces, Node.js 24, Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), Helm, CI/CD, Git
• •Architecture: Technical design documents, architecture decision records, and cross-team event contracts between Phenom and ReX

Required Skills and Experience:

• •6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on JavaScript/TypeScript
• •Deep expertise in Node.js back-end development and strong working knowledge of React
• •Proven experience designing and running distributed, event-driven systems (queues, pub/sub, background jobs) in production
• •Strong experience with API design (GraphQL and/or REST) and relational data modelling (PostgreSQL)
• •Track record of leading technical design and delivering complex features across teams
• •Hands-on experience with observability and production operations: metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and incident handling
• •Solid understanding of security basics: authentication and authorization, role-based access, and secure handling of confidential data such as reviewer identities and reports
• •Experience with cloud-native deployment (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
• •Experience mentoring engineers and shaping team engineering practices
• •Clear written and spoken communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have:

• •Experience building highly configurable, workflow-driven SaaS products (workflow engines, state machines, role-based permissions)
• •Experience modernising a large codebase, such as incremental framework migration (e.g. to NestJS) or splitting services out of a monolith
• •Experience with recommendation or matching features (e.g. expert finding) and integrations with identity or user-profile platforms
• •OpenTelemetry, Grafana (Loki/Tempo), and Prometheus at scale
• •Contract testing (e.g. consumer-driven contracts for APIs and events)
• •Background in academic publishing, peer review, research integrity, or regulated domains

What Success Looks Like:

• •Complex features ship predictably, with clear designs and few production surprises
• •Review becomes measurably more reliable and observable (fewer failed events, actionable alerts), with test coverage tracked in CI
• •Engineers on the team grow in autonomy and quality through your mentoring and reviews
• •Architectural decisions are documented, shared, and aligned with the wider Phenom platform

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