Frontend Developer Universities, Arts & Nonprofits

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 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.

As 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.

Our 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.

Cast 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…