techVenture Clients & Jobs

Systems Engineer

2009-09-12T00:23:10Z

Shopkick is looking for a Systems Engineer to make the service hum, drawing on a comprehensive knowledge of operating systems, tools and techniques, deployment, automation, and robust practices.

Responsibilities

Design network and systems infrastructure.
Active participant in architectural design and component selection.
Set up and create monitoring and alerting infrastructure.
Release engineering, including creation of deployment scripts.
MySQL database administration.
Real-time response to production issues.

Skills

You are a jack of all trades and a master of many, due to your unusually broad technology interests. You are not only the kind of person who knows what revision of MySQL fixed which bugs, and care enough to keep the systems patched before problems erupt, but also can write the code that keeps the systems running smoothly.
You've had diverse responsibilities in a high-traffic web environment; being "the guy" who is there first and sets it all up won't be anything new to you, and you'll do it a little bit differently this time around from all the insight you gained the last time out.
You are fanatical about availability and stability. You respond immediately when there is a problem, but more than anything else you care about keeping things from breaking, to the point that you take on release engineering responsibilities to make sure it's done right.
Though you approach a service from a systems perspective and don't always see the world the same way as the development engineers, you can see how the world looks from their point of view and help educate them on best practices and processes for stability.
You're not purely a systems administrator. If you wanted to, you could be a development engineer as well. You are comfortable with scripting languages and able to set up monitoring and alerting infrastructure, deployment scripts, etc. Your comfort with coding feeds your ability to make infrastructure choices, which you do with a strong systems perspective.
You have solid chops as a MySQL database administrator. You're intimately familiar with the intricacies of replication, query analysis, and analytic reporting, and are an active participant in discussions about appropriate schemas and queries.
You're comfortable with service-oriented architectures, data buses, non-relational datastores, and other not-entirely-universal components.
You are sensitive to performance issues and routinely provide input based on your analysis of what caching would be helpful, how to address database performance issues, etc.

Experience

At least three years' experience in systems administration/engineering for distributed, high-volume web services.
MySQL database administration responsibilities for a high-traffic database-driven site.
Responsibility for basic network engineering responsibilities.
Deploying live into a production environment.
Experience setting up, and writing scripts for, monitoring and alerting tools (e.g. Ganglia, Cacti, Nagios).
Experience with non-relational datastores a plus.
Experience with services "in the cloud" preferred.
Experience with service-oriented architectures, such as Thrift, ActiveMQ, etc., strongly preferred.

To apply, please send your resume to jobs@shopkick.com with Systems Engineer in the subject line.

Server Side Engineer

2009-09-12T00:18:11Z

Shopkick is looking for a Server-Side Engineer to write the logic that powers web and mobile services, informed by a thoroughgoing knowledge of infrastructure, scalability, and performance.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, benchmark, and deploy simple, elegant, high-performance code.
Create scalable infrastructure supporting rapid expansion.
Design and implement flexible APIs supporting location-based services from smart phones.

Skills

You have a thoroughgoing understanding of server-side engineering for web sites, using open-source software stacks.
You are a creative thinker, with a knack for finding the simple "right" answer, in an extensible way.
You like to develop code in an "agile" development, working closely with product and the rest of the engineering team throughout the development process.
You are comfortable with database design and querying, preferably MySQL: you know the trade-offs in schema design, you're not the kind of person who delegates all queries to an ORM, and you know (and care) what is efficient.
You have worked on projects that have "scaled big." You automatically think about distributed systems. It's likely (and desirable) that you were there for a lot of growth, and you've got some scars from scaling that have taught you how to approach scalability.
You understand the underpinnings of large-scale distributed systems, including communications mechanisms, caching technologies, etc.
You have experience in API design, and RESTful services are second nature for you. You're also comfortable with binary wire protocols, and know when to prefer one over the other.
You have been exposed to service-oriented architectures. You're comfortable with the idea of combining data from various sources on the fly, and with figuring out how to get it fast.
Since you care about scalability and are something of an out-of-the-box thinker, it's likely that you have extensive experience with non-relational data stores as well (Sleepycat, BigTable, Cassandra, etc.).
You have an unusually comprehensive systems-level understanding of web services. You can think backwards from an SLA to figure out what types od redundancy are needed and how to provide it inexpensively, using open-source technologies.
You are sensitive to performance issues and routinely instrument code and address bottlenecks with appropriate data models, algorithms, tools, and techniques.
You are the sort of person whom your peers naturally gravitate toward and look to for expertise when they are lost. You like to code, but you are also a leader.

Experience

At least four years' experience writing distributed, high-volume web services.
Familiarity with several open-source application development stacks.
Facility with SQL query analysis.
BSCS or better, or equivalent experience.
Experience with service-oriented architectures, such as Thrift, ActiveMQ, etc., strongly preferred.
Experience designing APIs preferred.
Expertise in Python a strong plus. Pylons is an added bonus.
Exposure to enterprise systems in a previous life a plus.

To apply send your resume to jobs@shopkick.com with Server Side Engineer in the subject line.

Mobile Engineer

2009-09-12T00:00:19Z

Shopkick is looking for a Mobile Engineer who combines a passion for technology with insight into how it is changing our world.

Responsibilities

Design and implement client code for location-based services on smart phones.
Coordinate with server-side engineers to design efficient, flexible APIs.

Skills

Guru of all things mobile. You are the one everyone comes to for advice about Objective C or how to get the physics of the accelerometer right. You care about these devices, so you have written code for all of the major platforms, even though you didn't really have to.
Some of your projects have been used by a lot of people. Since you love to play around with mobile toys in your free time, some may have been used only by you.
You know when data should be stored locally and how to do it, and you understand when a server is needed, how to talk to it, and perhaps most important how to design the interfaces to do so.
You have written code for interacting with the analog world - GPS, accelerometer, voice analysis, imaging, magnetometer, it doesn't really matter. The point is that you think about the way devices interact with the world we live in.
You have a deep understanding of how people want to use mobile technology, and what will and won't work. You have strong opinions on what is good or bad design, and you can pitch in wherever and however needed.
If you have experience with back-end web engineering, so much the better. It won't be your primary responsibility, but it's great perspective.

Experience

At least two years' experience writing software for major mobile platforms (iPhone, RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, etc.).
iPhone development experience, with applications in the app store.
BSCS or better, or equivalent experience.
Experience with location-based services, GPS, etc. preferred.
Experience with multiple mobile platforms preferred.

To apply, send your resume to jobs@shopkick.com with Mobile Engineer in the subject line.