Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

We sell to the people and companies that organize events and conferences. We provide something similar to linkedin or facebook but highly optimized for the in-person, business conference setting. We have to provide fantastic desktop and mobile experiences to meet onsite/offsite interaction needs of our end users.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Have you ever been to a conference? The events industry is huge! We sell to all sizes of conference from a few hundred attendees to tens of thousands. We don’t have millions of users, but we earn significant money from those that we do have as companies are willing to pay a premium for a highly customized social network that meets the very specific needs of their conference or event.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

That we won’t be able to grow a top-notch engineering team fast enough to meet the significant demand for our products and services.

What’s the biggest misconception about the company?

We don’t get a lot of press coverage by the likes of Techcrunch et al, probably because our industry isn’t extremely technology obsessed. We’re OK with that. It’s allowed us to stay a little under the radar while growing into a profitable company that’s never needed VC funding.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

We’re up to 14 employees now, including two of the original founders (the CEO and CTO). We’re growing quickly and continuing to hire. While we have offices in Seattle only about half our team is here. Anyone can work remotely as much as they want. We’re organized around Google App, Campfire, Tracker and Skype. You’ll work directly with the CEO and CTO and your code will be live within a week of starting.

Position: Front-end User Interface Designer / Developer

Do you scoff at those who claim JavaScript is not a “real” language? Have you been hacking a side project just to experiment with Node? Does the idea of moving the entire web framework into the browser excite you? Are you tired of working for short-lived start-ups that think “angel funding” is a business model and “VC Funding” is an exit? Then, my friend, we’ve got the job for you. Our growing, profitable, bootstrapped company is seeking to add a talented, motivated expert JavaScript developer who is excited about building the next version of our industry-leading product with us (seriously, it is industry leading).

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

CoffeeScript/JavaScript Ruby/Rails CSS3/SASS HTML5

Specific Responsibilities:

- Architect and develop a full featured client application using JavaScript/CoffeeScript and Backbone.js — we’re serious about using the latest and best technologies available
- Help design a beautiful front-end interface using jQuery, SASS, and CSS3
- Aggressively test front-end code using Jasmine and other JavaScript testing frameworks
- Be creative and proactive about feature and architecture decisions
- Occasionally spend time with Ruby/Rails3 on the back-end

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Implement a matching algorithm that ties information gleaned about users from facebook, twitter, and linkedin to make suggestions about who one should meet (that they don’t already know) at a conference.

Skills and Experience:
- Expert experience developing web applications and web services with JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS
- Ruby/Rails experience a big plus
- Comfort working in an agile startup environment. Our cycles are extremely fast and your code will be up and running on our production site the first week you start
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high-energy, best-idea-wins environment
- BS, MS or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline a plus

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

Work directly with the CTO and CEO and the rest of the engineering team on a daily basis to design and implement features for our desktop and mobile web application.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Our customers are companies who want to analyze large amounts of data. One example is a telecom infrastructure provider who uses cell phone signals emitted every 15-seconds to perform cell tower reliability analysis.

To our customers, we appear completely as an ordinary PostgreSQL database (with the exception of requiring a membership file). Under the covers, we distribute the data across a cluster of commodity machines, and process incoming queries in parallel. Our initial results, using the industry standard TPC-H benchmark, show that we outperform leading database vendors in price/performance ratios by 100x.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

We make money by selling software licenses.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Finding motivated hackers. We have a lot of challenges at hand, from scaling on the cloud to understanding our customers’ analytics and data mining needs, and we need the right set of people to attack these challenges.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

That we are solving a well understood problem. We provide our users with a standard PostgreSQL interface, while we partition the data and incoming queries across a cluster of machines under the covers.

This requires solving many technical challenges: managing distributed state and keeping it consistent in the face of failures, minimizing network I/O by pushing as much of the computation as possible to the data, repartitioning and shuffling data to perform efficient table joins, and scaling to hundreds of machines on the cloud.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

We are four: two technical and one business co-founder, and a software developer.

Position: Software Engineer

Citus Data is hiring software developers who’ll help us build the next generation database. As a member of the founding team, you’ll design and implement software that tackles a wide variety of challenges: distributed query planning and optimization, distributed data consistency, data storage engines optimized for analytics, and so forth.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

We are extending PostgreSQL and are working closely with Hadoop’s codebase. Therefore, a good background in C or Java, and some understanding of systems (compilers, networking, OS) is a plus.

Neither are a requirement however. We are mostly looking for people with the following qualities: potential, potential, potential.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

We are growing our team.

Please note that the listed position is in Istanbul, but for candidates that we hire, we offer the option to work from Palo Alto within one year.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

* A task scheduling algorithm that both deterministically and evenly spreads the work across nodes in the cluster, while also minimizing network I/O
* Map/Reduce programs that address our customers’ data mining needs
* A persistent connection pool between Citus DB nodes; this should reduce connection set-up overhead dramatically
* Foreign Data Wrapper integration into PostgreSQL (Citus DB) so that our database can also directly work with log / text files

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

You’ll be interacting closely with the technical co-founders. We are both Stanford / Amazon alumni, and have been working together on this project for almost two years.

Right now, our reporting structure works by general consensus. Depending on your familiarity with this space, we will give you general guidelines, sync up regularly for feedback, and answer your questions. If your code works, passes our code reviews and tests, it gets checked in.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

ShowMe is a place where you can learn or teach anything.

We make it insanely easy for someone who wants to teach to create a lesson using our iPad app – and just as easy for anyone who wants to learn those teachers.

The general concept of peer-to-peer learning is not new, but our thoughtful approach to well-designed and robust products, along with an emphasis on community, has proven quite successful.

We have hundreds of thousands of users, many of them teachers and educators, who are incredibly passionate about our mission to make quality education available to everyone in the world.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

We’re collecting incredibly valuable learning content through our platform.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

How to create the best learning experience possible through design and data.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

That we’re not very different from Khan Academy.

Whereas the Khan Academy is building a standardized, proprietary “curriculum” through Sal Khan’s lessons, we’re creating an open community that presents more than one perspective/approach to a given subject, and gives every great teacher a chance to shine.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

We have a team of 8, mostly developers. Everyone is expected to be independent and mostly self-directed.

Position: Web Developer

We’re looking for an incredibly talented web developer who can, simply put, get things done. We’re solving some very tough problems around design, data, and technology; regardless of any particular languages you’re used to, you should be able to adapt and learn as necessary.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Our web stack is LAMP (PHP) with some jQuery, with an MVC-based framework. Our app code is Objective-C + iOS.

Although if you’re smart, experience with particular languages shouldn’t matter too much.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

We’re growing the team to solve even more challenging problems than we’ve faced to date.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

- scale our backend/DB
- use data to make our learning platform smarter and more personalized
- design and implement innovative solutions to new ideas

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

Ours is a high-collaboration, low-supervision environment. You will “own” the project you work on, but have plenty of support from the team around you.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Leadnomics sits between everyday people who need something — insurance, a financial service product, or any number of local offers — with the service providers who can get it to them at the best rates. Our customers get great service from reputable companies they may never have heard of before, and the companies we partner with get the kind of clients they work best with. We make lives easier, and take the stress away from finding the services that everyday people need.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Companies that have a great product but are limited in the types of people they can serve are always looking for the best ways to find their ideal clients. They come to us, and we leverage our huge network to find them those people. Our service is free to customers, and we’re fully funded by the companies we’re able to match those customers up with.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

We deal with massive amounts of data. We have to store it securely, send it securely between services, process it through external APIs, handle a massive amount of logging for each of these interactions, all in realtime while a real person is waiting precious seconds for us to help them. Servers going down without seamless failovers, data being lost in transit, cost-effectively storing these massive amounts of data, and keeping everything secure are constant worries in the Leadnomics offices. We’ve been doing great so far, but find more and more challenges as we grow!

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

That our service is experimental, or a “startup” idea. We are entirely funded by our lead buyers with no reliance on outside investments. We’ve been running self-sufficiently for five years, and have more than doubled our revenue every year. We’ve found a niche that people need, and it’s growing at an alarming rate.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

Approximately 30 people, with a team of 7 talented developers, a large group of industry-savvy marketers, and the founder, HR and management glue to hold it all together.

Position: Web Applications Developer

Solve big problems with distributed application development and service-oriented architecture, such as how to handle misson-critical services going down, instant scalability, safe, live deployment, and security between separate API interactions. Must be well-versed in the concepts of fail-first design, SOA, non-blocking logic, and always using the best tool for the job.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Our backend stack is LAMP + Node.js, with PHP being used for request-based logic and Node.js used for oversight and daemonized services. It’s extremely important that any serious applicant be a PHP and Javascript ninja, but direct experience with Node.js isn’t required as long as the Javascript background is there. You’ll be diving headfirst into big problems, so knowing your way around these languages on day one will have a direct impact on our company!

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

Leadnomics is growing by leaps and bounds every year. Our development team of one high-school student has become a team of 7 highly-educated programmers, with backgrounds ranging from computer engineering to the latest in frontend mobile design to distributed application architecture.

We’re looking for someone who can hold their own in a group of people who are experts in their field, offering and carrying out new ideas in scalability and distributed application development.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Working with a Node.js data processing platform to handle the maximum possible amount of incoming leads while ensuring scalability and fault tolerance, without overloading any of our data stores before they have time to scale up. We’re all about efficiency: our platform gets the most value out of a minimal amount of hardware.

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

Our development team is separated into 2 front-end developers and 5 back-end developers. You’d be working most closely with the back-end devs, who range in seniority from four years to three months. We’re a diverse crowd with off-the-wall senses of humor. The developers report to the development lead / lead architect, but we make most of the big decisions as a group — often attacking a whiteboard with a small feast of snacks and beverages nearby. We’re a laid back crew, but passionate about our technology.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Box was founded on a simple, powerful idea: people should be able to access and share their content from anywhere. Since 2005, Box has helped more than 7 million individuals, small businesses and 77% of the Fortune 500 do just that. We want to reinvent what businesses can do with their content through Box’s cloud content management platform, made for a new kind of worker, a new kind of workplace and a new kind of IT.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Subscription-based model similar to Salesforce where companies pay per user per month.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Saving the world from the evils of Sharepoint and FTP servers.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

300 people based out of Palo Alto, CA. The biggest groups at Box include engineering and sales. Learn more about the different groups at Box at www.box.com/jobs.

Position: Web Application Engineer

At Box, we’re changing the way people work, making it really easy to access, manage and collaborate on business content in the cloud. We’re successfully disrupting the traditional enterprise software market — making it as easy and secure to share files inside and outside the company, bringing the usability and quick iteration of a consumer application to the enterprise world and going from sale to deployment in hours, not months

We’re building – from the ground up – for the cloud, and we want you to join us.

As a Web Application Engineer at Box, it’s all about ownership. You’ll be responsible for end-to-end development of new features and frameworks, focusing on high-performance implementations without neglecting the user experience. You’ll work in PHP, Scala and JavaScript, but you’ll be responsible for writing quality HTML and CSS too.

You will work closely with other developers and project management in a collaborative and energetic environment. Here, we iterate quickly and refactor frequently, writing well-structured and elegant code to solve critical business needs – and to provide the best possible experience for Box users.

At Box, our development team is still small, moves quickly, and is full of A-level engineers from academic institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and MIT to companies like Google, LinkedIn, and eBay. We are looking for innovative thinkers who are willing to learn and who can solve the technical challenges at Box with creativity and persistence.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

- Deep understanding of MVC concepts and frameworks
- Extremely comfortable programming the LAMP stack
- Knowledge of MySQL optimization and good schema design
- Ability to solve complex problems in a sophisticated web application

Bonus Points if you have:
Experience with Scala, Java, C, C++ or C#
Experience with Javascript/AJAX in large-scale applications

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

Adding more people to our talented web app team!

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Own the development of a new feature and build it from start to finish. Work with a variety of cutting-edge technologies along the way, including HTML5, CSS3, PHP5, Javascript/AJAX and MySQL.

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

You’ll interact with people across the entire engineering and tech ops team to build and test your feature.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

HotelTonight matches consumers who need a last-minute place to stay with hotel rooms that would otherwise go unsold. We started the company because we thought the world needed a better way to book a hotel room for instant check-in, on-demand, whenever and wherever you need it. With our app, you can book a room in under 10 seconds, until 2am, and save up to 70%. (we’re the top rated hotel booking app in the App Store & Android Market). For hotels, we provide a flexible way to discount and sell distressed inventory.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

We take a healthy percentage of each sale – a well-established model for hotel bookings.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

As we add more capabilities and functionality to our products, that we maintain the trademark simplicity and elegance that we’re known for.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

That our development team just builds apps. We’ve created the world’s first mobile-only online travel agency, and our proprietary back-end interfaces with hotels for inventory-loading, transaction processing and reservation delivery. 65% of our code base is non-app related. Creating our own back-end and API gives us tremendous flexibility to quickly add new features and optimize the mobile booking experience.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

We are 30 – 6 development, 14 sales and marketing, 10 customer support.

Position: iOS Developer

Develop the world’s best iOS applications by push the envelope with what is possible with iOS, and keeping the product true to our core product values of Simplicity, Beauty & Fscking Usefulness. Take advantage of the newest features and reject the common ways of solving problems. Work with the rest of the team to extend our APIs and other systems to support your ideas.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

You should have excellent knowledge of iOS, Cocoa Touch, and related technologies. Ideally, you have published apps in the App Store and they have stellar reviews.

You are excited by and familiar with the tools and methodologies we use for building great software, including Git, Objective-C, a multitude of open source libraries, and tools and techniques for a great development environment.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

We’re looking to grow our team of world-class iOS developers.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

We expect our developers to also define big portions of the products they build. If you want to be handed a complete product spec on your first day, you’d probably be happier working elsewhere.

Specific tasks include adding functionality to our iPhone app to make the experience more convenient, and helping to build our iPad app.

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

We’re 10 months old and our iOS team has been in place for 5 months. You’d officially report to the CTO but we have a very informal company style and we expect you to work independently and in collaboration with the rest of the team.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Our users are anyone who deals with a lot of information – or, more succinctly, everyone. We make it possible to search and connect your information from disparate online sources in to a cohesive, simple, and useful experience.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Premium users pay us in order to add data from accounts like Evernote, Basecamp, Salesforce, Yammer, etc.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Everyone we can spend 10 minutes with and show our product loves it – we want to make sure users who we never meet get the same experience through great product design.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

That we do “social search”. Unfortunately, those two words don’t really mean anything, and even if they did, it wouldn’t mean us. We’re all about organizing information for each of our users, some of which is social, but much more comes from email, calendars, Dropbox, etc.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

There are 12 Grepliners right now. 2 technical founders, 8 engineers, 1 designer, and 1 “everything-else” person. We work together in San Francisco and hang out with each other when we’re not working.

Position: iOS Engineer

Help build the Greplin iPhone app – work on client side code optimized for ease-of-use, speed, and simplicity.
Learn More

Position: Reliability Engineer

You love keeping big, distributed systems alive. Build systems for automation, deployment, testing, failover and redundancy. You are part of the engineering team.
Learn More

Position: Generalist Engineer

We always have room for ridiculously great people. You should be obsessed with programming, build cool stuff in your free time, and crank out features quickly.
Learn More

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Our users are pretty much everybody. We create games that are fun and help you make new friends within the games themselves.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Our company monetizes through the sales of virtual goods within our games.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Our biggest concern is how to keep growing our company while keeping our teams agile. Because we hire the best and brightest software developers, we keep processes and management overhead as light as possible so that everybody can focus on building amazing things. Great developers crave ownership, and we strive to give them as much as possible.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

Most people think our company is just a social games company. Although we build social games, we are a technologically focused company. We have invested most of our resources into building out a platform for quick development of mobile applications, deep data analytics and a scalable platform (think distributed systems). Additionally, social games are just the surface of what our company is working on. Talk to us to find out more.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

We currently have around 40 people, with over 20 software engineers. Our organization doesn’t have much of a hierarchy, and we have a culture of ownership and data-driven decision making.

Position: Software Development Engineer

A Thinking Ape is currently looking for an extremely smart and talented Software Engineer to become permanent members of our core team in our downtown Vancouver, BC office. You should be comfortable with designing and implementing applications from beginning to production and enjoy working on massive scale technical problems.

Your background should include: proven software engineering talents, solid knowledge and understanding of web architecture, clear communication in code and in writing, interest in metrics and data analysis and the itch to make something people want.

It would be a definite plus if you are contributing or have contributed to an open source project, you have launched your own iPhone app and Facebook app and registered at and regularly read Hacker News (and send us your username if you do).

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Experience with some of the technology that we use including: python, java, objective-c, javascript, apache, linux, memcached, redis, zeromq, mongrel.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

We are growing our team.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Some examples of what our engineers have worked on:

- Getting into the details of great user experience design. For example, the timing of a glowing pulse in our web client mimics a fast-beating human heart in order to convey urgency.

- Creating a WebSockets compliant mobile application framework for the iPhone that allows real-time events to be pushed from the server.

- Building a dynamic map-rendering engine with adjacency detection for conquering territory in an upcoming game.

- Designing and executing experiments based on product metrics data and user feedback.

- Real-time write back caching without the use of an external daemon process\\n- Automated data encoding for internal and external facing services

- Guaranteed message delivery for messaging and notifications

- Intelligent service fail-over routing framework

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

We are a small group of ambitious software engineers who value ownership, creative freedom, data driven decisions and meritocracy over hierarchy. We get to work on products that millions of people use every day and have built some of the strongest online mobile game communities.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Edmodo is a free , secure and totally radical social learning platform for the K12. Edmodo brings the functionality of student and learning information systems to the social graph with the goal of enhancing student-teacher collaboration, sharing and communication. We aim to transform the classroom and improve learning outcomes through compelling, simple to use, and powerful learning technologies.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Edmodo aims to become the pervasive platform for the k12. In this way, like Facebook is your social graph, and LinkedIn is your professional graph, Edmodo will become your edu-graph. P.S. We will never have to sit around telling one another that somehow targeting advertising is making the world a better place, because we’ll NEVER advertise. Period.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Many individuals, organizations, not-for-profits have tried and failed to make a difference in primary and secondary education. There are so many problems with our schools, and teachers carry the burden of large classroom sizes and shrinking budgets. We all here at Edmodo feel a dire urgency to serve our teachers by making their jobs easier, while at the same time improving the learning experience of students. There’s not enough hours in the day or days in the week to build the tools we know teachers want and need. But doing just that is our tireless mission and our passion.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

Many technology companies that have started off with free products, usually end up wanting to charge something at some point or turn to advertising to make money. Edmodo has made a public promise to always remain free to teachers, student, parents, schools and districts. Moreover, we will never advertise, in any way, ever.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

Edmodo is based in San Mateo, CA in the old AdMobs office. All of our employees are located in the headquarters office. We are still under 50 employees!!!

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Our top focus is on solving the AI problem. Users and clients are a distraction that has caused many past AI companies to give up on solving the real problem and instead settle for a local maxima.

As the first step towards building intelligent machines, we are developing a vision system that understands the contents of images and videos the way humans do. Our technology automates pattern recognition and reconstruction problems in image and video search, surveillance, gaming, medical image analysis, robotics, navigation and geo-spatial image analysis.

What’s the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

This is the hardest, most important problem we can think of solving.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

People aren’t used to seeing startups work on strong AI.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

There are four of us, all technical, and all work in the same office.

Position: Developer Scientist

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Python, C, CUDA

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Quantify the performance of our vision networks under different conditions. Tease apart implementation bugs from algorithm bugs. Create a more efficient sparse learning algorithm.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Gamers are our customers. The Humble Indie Bundle promotions broke new ground and were a driving force in putting indie games on the map. We aim to create a win-win-win situation: customers get awesome games, indie developers are rewarded for their hard work and innovation, and worthwhile charities get extra exposure and support. All of our promotions feature cross-platform, DRM-free games, ensuring that all gamers are getting a fantastic, honest deal.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Our Humble Indie Bundle game sales draw a massive, worldwide audience and are exceedingly popular. In under two years, we’ve sold $9 million worth of bundles, with over $3 million going to charity. We’re profitable and we’re backed by Sequoia Capital.

What’s the biggest misconception about your company?

Folks always seem surprised at the small size of our staff relative to the big splash that our promotions have made. We get a lot done, and we’re excited to do much more. Join us!

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

There are two founders and four full-time Humble Bundle employees based in downtown San Francisco at 2 Mint Plaza. We also have part-time support staff.

Position: Software Engineer

Humble Bundle’s software engineers develop highly scalable, elegant web applications that power our indie game promotions and other disruptive initiatives.

Why is this Position open? What kind of person are you looking for?

Humble Bundle wants to make our existing applications more efficient, and we’re ready to ship new, Internet-melting projects out into the world.
The ideal candidate has experience with both front-end and back-end work, but we will consider proficient engineers who are more experienced in one than the other. Our team believes that talented engineers can learn new skills easily, so we will also consider experienced software engineers who would like to learn web development.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

We’re a small, focused, fast-moving company, and so the challenges on the table can shift day-to-day. We’re looking to bring on someone adaptable and innovative to bring ideas and skills to the team. We have broad goals, but we intend to build tasks around talent.
Otherwise, in all likelihood, you will be challenged to a showdown in Starcraft 2, Frozen Synapse, or Magic: the Gathering at least once a week.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Our backend is in Python, running on Google App Engine. The Humble Bundle website uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Knowledge of the principles of scalable web development is important.

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

A software engineer would likely work out plans and ideas with the CEO/technical lead, and would definitely interact with everyone at the company on a regular basis. The company is about a year old.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Gaming entertainment, which encompasses a lot of forms of video game influenced content but is most well known for the very large and growing competitive gaming (eSports) scene, is the first industry that has opted to bypassed TV and choose the internet as their main method of content delivery.  TwitchTV not only has the infrastructure necessary for large tournaments, professionals, and individual players to reach their audience on an ever expanding number of platforms, but also provides monetization tools with its partner program; subscription and pay per view options, as well as on-demand commercial breaks.  Further, TwitchTV is the largest live video website that caters directly to gamers, providing them with gaming specific features that more general video websites cannot replicate.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

TwitchTV makes money primarily through advertising, but also on subscriptions and pay per view events.

What is the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Competition from larger corporations trying to move into our space (bet you can guess who).

How many people work in the company? How are they distributed and organized?

About 40 people fulltime in our downtown San Francisco office.  While we are still about 70% engineering, we have brought on a lot of industry experience to help us on the business side, such as well know gaming personalities djWheat and 2GD for eSports community relations, and Jonathan Simpson-Bint (founder of IGN) on the gaming publisher side.

What is the biggest misconception about the company?

That everyone in our office is a hardcore gamer.  There’s a fairly even split between the number of self identified gamers and non-gamers.

Positions: Software Engineer, UI Developer

We are looking for talented engineers to tackle serious distributed systems / scaling issues, and UI developers passionate about making beautiful web apps

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Backend is mostly Python / Twisted with Postgresql database, and frontend is Ruby on Rails, jQuery / Javascript.  We need both people with experience in distributed systems and those eager to learn.  On the front-end, having some kind of body of work showing a understanding of the importance of UI fundamentals is necessary.  Whether that comes from industry experience or personal projects is unimportant.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

We are very much in growth mode. There is a lot we want to get done this next year, and need your help!

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

For Software Engineer:
* Hack on a decentralized real-time video load-balancer
* Build a fault-tolerant scheduler/monitor for long running tasks
* Help scale the world’s large streaming video delivery system by an order of magnitude

For UI Developer:
* Rethink our flash development process for one of the most widely-used video players on the web
* Help build awesome, engaging front-end features that gamers will love
• Performance tune existing elements to make them faster and reusable

Who will this person interact with on a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure?

As a company we are very tightly knit, so you’ll be having conversations with everyone in the organization from time to time.

Ever since the release of TwitchTV the company has been growing extremely quickly, so while we have a handful of veteran engineers and designers that have been working here for years, a majority have joined us here in 2011.

Aside from the technical leads for each of our teams, who all were all originally hired as engineers, our organization is very flat and everyone is made responsible for their own projects.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

AeroFS is a distributed peer-to-peer file syncing and collaboration tool.  We are able to offer unlimited storage, strong security, and privacy for free. We’re building the product to target people with large amounts of data who wish to sync their devices (e.g. photographers, designers), and people who care about security and compliance (e.g. businesses, enterprises, government and so on).

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Because we don’t actually host/store any of the data, we are able to provide a very disruptive pricing model. Although the model isn’t public yet, you can expect it to be significantly more cost-effective than existing competitive solutions. Of course, if you make it to our face-to-face interviews, we’d be very happy to discuss this in detail with you

What is the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Our highest priority and concern (beyond building a great product) is hiring great engineers. We are looking to double the size of our team in the near future, and we want to make sure that the people we hire are exceptional and fun to work with.

How many people work in the company? How are they distributed and organized?

We are a small team! There are 6 of us today — we are all technical (including the founders) and love solving hard problems. The team is based in the heart of downtown Palo Alto in a GORGEOUS office with tons of open space and sunshine.

The office is arranged such that we all sit together in one big open space arranged into groups of four. We have morning sync ups and monthly one-on-ones, and due to the size of our team we have a very flat hierarchy where each team member gets equal input into both the product and the business direction.

Position: Software Engineer

As a Software Engineer you will have an opportunity to solve challenging problems across the entire AeroFS stack: OS/Databases/File Systems/Networking/etc…

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

AeroFS is designed using C, C++, Java and some Objective-C. We also use Protocol Buffers, MySQL, SQLite, and a variety of other technologies to make everything work well and seamlessly together.

Ideally, you should have strong knowledge of at least one programming language. We don’t care which one, but you should be able to pick up unfamiliar languages, tools, and technologies quickly.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

Our current team is highly specialized on the systems side of things, but there are many problems to be solved across the entire software stack. We’re looking for a few smart people to join our team and help us solve these problems

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

This truly is a full-stack position, which means that your tasks may vary widely. As a  quick example of things that we’ve done and/or need to do:
- You may be hacking parts of an operating system
- Implementing NAT traversal protocols
- Optimizing database engines
- Designing distributed algorithms and studying their properties

Some concrete examples:
- Optimize a pseudo-TCP protocol stack
- Design an open API that allows developers to access the AeroFS core

Who will this person interact with on a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure?

Because we are a small team we have the luxury of having a flat hierarchy without much management overhead. We do stand-ups every morning, and monthly one-on-ones. Technically speaking, you will be reporting to our CTO, but realistically, you’re accountable to the team.

Position: iOS/Android Engineer

As an iOS/Android Engineer you would be responsible for creating the first AeroFS iOS and/or Android app!

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

AeroFS is designed using C, C++, Java and some Objective-C. We also use Protocol Buffers, MySQL, SQLite, and a variety of other technologies to make everything work well and seamlessly together.

Of course, as the iOS and Android applications are currently non-existant, you would be deciding on the proper technologies to use.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?

Our current team comes from a heavily desktop-oriented background, but we still realize that mobile is the way of the future.  We are looking for smart iOS and Android developer to come help us realize that future!

Position: Infrastructure / Test Engineer

Building sophisticated tools to test, verify, and deploy large-scale distributed systems.

Why is this Position open? Are you replacing a role or growing a team?
Distributed Systems are hard, and making sure that they run correctly is even harder. In fact, we think it’s a full time job! As such, we are looking for an engineer who enjoys working with large scale systems (thousands of nodes) to help us make sure the system runs correctly.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Amongst other things, your tasks will include building and maintaining a logging and monitoring infrastructure that can detect and categorize anomalies for programs running in a distributed environment.

You will NOT be “QA Engineer”, but you will be responsible for building out a large-scale testbed of automatic test/verification tools for distributed file systems, which means you should have strong knowledge of operating systems, and at least one programming language.

Position: Web Engineer

Building out the AeroFS web application.

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

AeroFS is designed using C, C++, Java and some Objective-C. We also use Protocol Buffers, MySQL, SQLite, and a variety of other technologies to make everything work well and seamlessly together.

Of course, as the web application is currently non-existant, you would be deciding on the proper technologies to use.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

You would be in charge of creating a web interface for AeroFS, as well as maintaining and expanding the current AeroFS web presence.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

We are fixing the infrastructure in the financial aggregation and reporting space while creating what we believe to be one of the largest and most powerful networks in the world. Right now, there are tremendous inefficiencies in finance, these inefficiencies collectively cost billions of dollars a year and waste millions of man hours. Our clients are fed up with this wasteful obfuscated manual system and turn to our software to intuitively analyze and understand their complex financial holdings. We collect, analyze ,order and bring insight to massive amounts of financial data. Our customers use the software to manage pension funds and endowments in addition to retirement accounts and trusts on behalf of clients of all sizes. In a nut shell, we help everyone to expand their understanding of their assets, the risks associated with those assets and help them maximize the allocation of capital.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Our customers are excited to pay for the opportunity to use our software.

What is the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Our software holds our clients intimate financial details; there is zero margin for error when dealing with such confidential and important information. Our second concern is scaling and growing our team to meet the robust demand that’s been exhibited throughout our beta period.

How many people work in the company? How are they distributed and organized?

We have approximately 35 employees distributed among our engineering, design, and business development teams. Almost 2/3rds of our employees are engineers.

What is the biggest misconception about your company?

The biggest misconception is that we are taking part in the broken financial system and perpetuating inefficiencies that enrich a few people at the expense of the majority.  In fact, we are an engineering company that is creating value by building key tools for a future  financial system where participants can engage in a more transparent and equitable way. Our software helps universities, pension funds, individuals, and non-profits understand and evaluate their financial wellbeing.

Addepar is still deciding which positions it would like to hire for.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

Generating trade ideas, surveying the market, and modeling risk are challenges we face on a daily basis. We deal with huge data sets and computationally intensive models that create a never ending stream of interesting problems. BlueMountain has particular edge at the seams and intersections of a market that continues to be characterized by a high degree of artificial boundaries.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

BlueMountain or its affiliates are receive management fees and performance compensation.  For providing advisory services, BlueMountain or its affiliates are compensated through a management fee charged to advisory clients and performance compensation with respect to certain fund clients.

What is the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

Adapting to ever changing markets with new and exciting opportunities, staying nimble, staying focused.

What’s the biggest misconception about the company?

Misconception: We’re not cool, fun people to be around.

Truth: We’re actually a great group of down-to-earth, no-ego people.  Yes, we’re really smart but we really believe in the ‘work hard, play hard, have fun’ mentality.   We have fun team outings and love to spend our free time on athletics, the arts, philanthropy, programming, gadgets, etc.

How many people work in the company? How are they distributed and organized?

120 people total, 100 in NYC, 20 in London. Quantitative Strategy is 10 programmers, 3 mathematicians and 3 support engineers all based in NYC.

Position: Quantitative Strategist

Quantitative strategists build and manage the technology and analytics backbone of the company. Coming up with scalable, creative solutions to problems involving our investment process is what we do on a daily basis. Our skills run a broad spectrum from quantitative modelers, financial engineers, to core systems programmers and everything in between.

Who are your users / clients? What problem does your company try to solve for them, and what makes your solution better than any others?

InterviewStreet is a middleman in a two sided market: Programmers and Companies. Technical hiring is horribly inefficient; resumes are a terrible way to screen people, and the crazy bad signal-to-noise ratio means that the good programmers don’t get the attention that they need to show why they’re special. By introducing a testing screen that no one else seems to be doing (a screen that is as accurate to the company’s job and as appropriate to the programmer’s time as possible) in the hiring funnel, we hope to make life simpler for everyone.

How does the company make money? (Or plan to make money?)

Companies are willing to pay large sums of money to help them find good people.

What is the company’s biggest concern? What keeps the CEO / Founders up at night?

We worry a lot about test fidelity; whether or not our tests are a good enough indicator of how well programmers will do at the company. It’s what’s driving us to create Real World Problems, to make tests that are as close to the actual work as possible.

Short term, we’re worried about our User Experience design. We built a lot of stuff really quickly, and know that its design is horribly ramshackle.

What’s the biggest misconception about the company?

That we’re new. InterviewStreet has actually been around for over 2 years, as a back end code review service. It’s only been recently that we’ve been in YCombinator and started CodeSprint, but our core tech has been around for a while and is pretty solid.

How many people are in the company? How are they distributed?

We are 5: Two technical founders, two devs, and one non-tech.

Position: Problem Creator

Create interesting programming problems for CodeSprint and other InterviewStreet products

Why is this Position open? What kind of person are you looking for?

We currently have 1 guy creating all the programming problems for everything. Given the rate at which we’re growing, he kind of needs help, and soon.

We’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades that knows a lot of languages and loves to work on interesting problems. You’ll be needing to shift gears fast, and create problems of every variety, from machine learning to databases to graph theory.

What is a representative set of tasks / problems that you have in mind for this person to work on, if he/she were able to start immediately?

Create algorithmic programming problems for CodeSprint 3.
Interface with companies who provide Real World Problems and adapt their problems to our system
Help companies using our Recruit product to come up with accurate problems for their particular positions

What is the technology stack that this position will interface with, and how crucial is the candidate’s experience with each technology?

Our web stack is LAMP + jQuery. Nothing too fancy. Our secret sauce, the CodeChecker, is written in C++. You need to be well-versed in web development in general, but we don’t require any specific language expertise. We realize that if you’re good, you’ll be able to get up to speed relatively quickly.

Who will this person interact with on a day-to-day basis? On a week-to-week basis? How new / veteran is the team that they will be joining, in terms of working together and within the company? What is the team’s reporting structure.

As we’re only 5, you’d be pretty much working with everyone, but you’ll be working especially closely with one of our co-founders, Hari.

The founders have been together for over 2 years, and we’ve all worked together for at least 2 months. Right now, there really isn’t so much a reporting structure as general consensus. You’re the expert of your domain and can make the call, but we trust you to notify us and get feedback when you think you need it.