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.