The MaTIAS web application helps frontline staff in reception centres communicate with asylum seekers by sending short messages translated automatically into the recipient's language. This role exists to maintain and extend that application, working across the React JS frontend and the Node.js backend and working with the central database and messaging integrations.
The mission
The project supports multilingual communication at scale: staff write messages in French, Dutch or English and the system translates them into 14 target languages before sending them via WhatsApp. The technical landscape is a single-page React JS frontend, a Node.js service layer, and a shared database, with third-party translation and messaging APIs. The feature set is mature but requires ongoing improvements, reliability work, and careful handling of message delivery and translations.
Day to day you will join a small cross-functional team responsible for the MaTIAS application. Your work will include implementing frontend UI changes in React JS, extending backend endpoints in Node.js, and ensuring safe, auditable message delivery through the WhatsApp messaging API. You will collaborate with product, QA, and operations to plan incremental releases and keep the service available for frontline users.
Your responsibilities
- Implement frontend features in React JS that make translated messages easy to compose, review and resend, delivering clear UX for non-technical users
- Develop and extend Node.js endpoints to handle message workflows, translation calls and delivery status tracking, reducing failed deliveries
- Integrate and maintain the connection to the WhatsApp messaging API and the chosen machine translation service, ensuring proper error handling and retries
- Improve and tune database queries and schemas to keep message throughput reliable and audit trails compact
- Write and maintain automated tests and deployment scripts to protect production users when releasing changes
- Collaborate with product owners and QA to define acceptance criteria and deliver small, frequent releases
Your profile
Essential skills
- 3+ years of professional experience as a full stack developer, with demonstrable React JS and Node.js work
- Strong JavaScript skills, including ES6+ patterns and asynchronous programming
- Experience working with a database to model message workflows and audit logs
- Practical experience integrating REST APIs and third-party services, ideally including messaging APIs such as WhatsApp
- Comfortable writing unit and integration tests and working with a Git-based workflow
- Clear communicator who can work in a small multidisciplinary team and translate product requirements into technical tasks
Languages
- English, B2 or higher