Working for us
N.B. we are not currently actively recruiting but if you think we are just made for each other feel free to drop us a line anyway. We are always happy to keep good people’s CVs on file.
Who are we looking for?
We are particularly keen to find one or two more top notch developers. We don’t regard people as fungible resources. We are not big on job titles; we are keen to find people who straddle disciplines and can be an effective part of our team.
We would value the following skills and experience:
- Experience with agile development processes such as Scrum, particularly agile testing.
- Experience, perhaps working in a startup, of balancing rapidity and flexibility with attention to detail and rigour.
- Ruby and Javascript are what we are currently using most but we expect you to have experience with other languages too. Polyglots preferred. Erlang particularly welcome.
- We are making increasing use of XMPP and AMQP for integrating realtime messaging with webapps, so knowledge and experience in this area would be a big plus.
- Experience of building web apps which scale to support serious loads.
- We expect you to have been involved in the development of multiple ‘production’ web apps, including at least one using Rails. You get extra kudos for demonstrable contribution to a successful open source project.
It goes without saying that front end development uses accessible, semantic markup to provide structure, enhanced with clean CSS for presentation and unobtrusive Javascript for behaviour. Progressive enhancement is the done thing.
In short you know your stuff.
For example if you write back end code we would expect you to know and be able to explain the difference between: static and dynamic typing; strong and weak typing; object oriented and functional programming. And to explain what design patterns are and when, why and how they might be useful.
If you do information architecture, interaction design or user experience design we would expect you to be able to talk intelligently about user centred design, service design, social software, participatory culture, pervasive media and how we weave technology into the fabric of our lives.
Whoever you are you need to be interested in building something that is ‘of the web not just on the web’.
Interested?
If you are interested in working with us please drop me a mail — with a CV, links to your work and a few lines about why you think we would be a good fit for each other — at kevin at jivatechnology dot com, or send a direct message to 326ADR (I know) on Twitter.
We’re not setting a deadline because it’s more important to us to find the right people than to find you by a certain date. But we do want to recruit as quickly as we can so the sooner you start a conversation the better.
No agencies thanks. Really, no. Not even to discuss whether we might like a free taster or might want to use you in the future.
What do we offer?
- The chance to work on building web applications that meet real social needs in an atmosphere of creative collaboration using the best tools for the job.
- Flexible and responsible working patterns, avoiding ‘crunch time’ and including ’10% time’.
- Decent holidays (30 days) and generous salaries (£25–45k). The hardware, software and training you need to do your best work and to continue to get better at what you do.
- Table football, coffee, settees but no beanbags.