tick113's comments

Dallas, TX: Core Engineer, Cloud Application

At Brainspace (http://brainspace.com), our goal is to meaningfully connect the world. We’re building the next generation of web and mobile applications on top of our groundbreaking and patented Brainspace platform, and we're passionate about creating the best possible core technology and user experiences.

We are growing rapidly, and as we do there are plenty of opportunities for engineers to shine. We work in Ruby, Java, and some Clojure, building complex systems with high scalability in the cloud. We're looking for an engineer to work on our core technology and service infrastructure. We are a young, fast-moving start up where everyone has a voice and can make a difference, so you'll play a key role in steering our technical direction as we continue to scale (quickly!).

Some tough things we are taking on:

    * Architecting and building our next generation of web services

    * Scaling up our existing systems to handle growing traffic

    * Identifying and building key new features for our core technology to meet the needs of our growing customer base

Things you’d be doing...

    * Participate in the planning, analysis, design, development and deployment of products, features and enhancements

    * Work as part of the development team to establish and apply the latest in engineering best practices

    * Build high-performance, scalable applications and APIs

You are a great fit if...

    * You want to solve hard problems

    * You think doing analytics in real time at web scale is a fun challenge

    * You want to work someplace where cookie-cutter off-the-shelf solutions aren't good enough.

    * You want to build something great.

    * You are willing to dig into Java, Ruby, NLP, and machine learning. And are not afraid of Elastic Search, Scala, Clojure, or whatever it takes to make great things work at web scale.

BONUS POINTS FOR:

    * Expertise in engineering world-class web applications

    * Experience with the AWS toolkit (EC2, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, etc) or similar

    * Familiarity and experience with modern search architectures

    * Experience in scaling a product from hundreds to thousands of users and beyond via load balancing, auto-scaling server deployment, HTTP accelerator caching, reverse proxies, failover, etc.

    * Experience with worker queues and clustering.

    * Strong understanding of high availability best practices in and out of the cloud * Experience with oAuth and Twitter / Facebook APIs

    * Excellent typing ability in the presence of flying nerf darts and RC helicopters

You’ll help lead our core development through its current, early stages to post-launch scaling. You love to ship code, have a strong sense of ownership, and an entrepreneurial spirit.

We offer:

    * A great company culture. We work hard and play hard!

    * A challenging objective with great opportunity to technically accomplish things you never thought you could

    * Competitive Salary, stock options and a 401k

    * Generous vacation policy

Do you want to come to work every day and creatively solve big market-driven problems? Our team is devoted to the continual pursuit of technical excellence. We will challenge and support you to get the most out of your potential, and expect you to do the same for us.

Sound interesting? Let's talk. Drop me a note - [email protected]

It sounds like a strong parallel with people who like to talk about doing great things, and people who actually do things.

Having written my own naive Clojure dot product, I can definitely appreciate what you guys have done!

Any plans to attack sparse vectors? Performance on the sparse vector operations I wrote was poor, but being new to Clojure it wasn't a great implementation.

My experience has been the opposite, and I think fixed price benefits both sides. Of course, it depends on the circumstance. Fixed price and hourly each have their place. I will say that a fixed price contracts can be tricky.

My primary point of reference is a medium sized fixed price project that was delivered early, and the customer loved the solution and came back for more business. I've also worked countless hourly contracts from both the customer and consultancy side.

1. Assuming a fixed price project requires a big up front spec is wrong. Follow lean/agile principles, iterate and refine. The contract should specify high level basic functionality and the problem being solved.

2. Hard to quantify, but hourly is plenty risky having worked both sides of the relationship. I've seen hours and hours burned building things that are not at all necessary. A fixed price helps everyone focus on building precisely what is needed.

3. Hourly rates put customer and consultant's priorities in line? From a short term view, if I'm paid hourly I'm going to milk the deal. If the consultancy is taking a long term view, everyones priorities are in line. Consultancy delivers fantastic product on time, it's a win by bringing the customer back, and word of mouth.

4. Again, it's how you structure the contract. If a giant spec is written up as part of a contract, you're doomed before you begin.

5. I'd argue the fixed price is a risk balance between the customer and consultancy. If the consultants finish early, they're rewarded. If they are late, they are penalized. This is in contrast to hourly, where it's win-win for the consultant.

You are definitely looking at the wrong developers. Long ago I figured out that being able to code well was just a portion of being a great developer. Learning how to deliver business value through coding is huge, and it's not been easy (at least for me).