Good catch! I said "front-end developer" but really we're just looking for smart full-stack developers or Javascript developers who are comfortable working across the stack. I've updated my post to reflect that.

Not that it applies to this post, but even though most of the projects I work on don't have nodejs on the server, the dev machine is running nodejs for build management. I probably wouldn't ask for a nodejs developer just to run grunt/gulp but I do like for all my front-end devs to play with nodejs so they at least know how their tools work a bit. After all, I wouldn't really want someone who spends their days writing javascript for the browser but isn't interested in using nodejs to customize their cli tools, at least.

My guess is that Node is responsible for serving the HTML/CSS/JS that's used by the front-end, and probably providing an isomorphic Ember endpoint down the road. So probably in the realm of knowledge that a front-end dev would need, but not a front-end tool in that it doesn't run in the browser.

Yeah, we're definitely interested in seeing what's possible with isomorphic Ember or React code. We don't necessarily require Javascript developers to come in with Node.js knowledge, but they should be interested in learning and a desire to holistically understand the web stack they're building on.