Full Stack Engineer / Hacker
Compensation: competitive
Employment Type: contract to eventual full-time, minimum 30 hours per week
Telecommuting: okay
Wanted: A collaborative, team-oriented, full stack, developer with a hacker mindset wanted for a funded, San Francisco based startup with actual revenue and customers.
Not wanted: Resumes, solo / cowboy programmers, NIH attitude
Your Monday
Monday morning you wake up, maybe have some coffee and breakfast, drag a comb across your head, and read through your email and Slack messages. You review the issues in our sprint backlog, as you get ready for our weekly 8:30am PST iteration planning meeting by Zoom. Maybe we play some planning poker to refine our estimates. After about an hour or so, we each feel good that we’re set to work on the most important things for this week, and we’re off and running. Maybe you commit to these tasks: (1) writing a new AWS Lambda Function in Python to implement a new feature; (2) defending against an attack on our codebase from other programmers, and (3) working closely with one of our customers who runs a top news website, to resolve a JavaScript error we're seeing on their site.
At 11:00am we scheduled a meeting to review a product requirements document that describes a major new feature we need to implement. You agree to lead the implementation of the new feature, so after the meeting you come up with a design for this new feature, and ask the team if they can review your design tomorrow. In the meantime, you sketch out a new data model, and draw out a flowchart or interaction diagram to clarify things for the review. After reviewing your design, we'll break down the work into stories or chores in the backlog or icebox.
It's lunch time, and you're done with 2 of your 3 scheduled meetings for the week. The rest of the week, you're up to your elbows in JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, and various back end services running on AWS like Lambda Functions, CloudFront, and Athena to name a few.
Now it's 1pm and you're ready to work on that customer issue. You look at the bug report details in Pivotal Tracker, connect into AWS and check our RDS and various EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk services to see if any of them are misbehaving. You don’t see anything there, so into Athena queries you go to examine our ad server log files, and what do you spy with your little eye? You see thousands of requests for the same ad image from the same user within a short amount of time. You go to the publisher’s website with a browser to examine the network requests, and sure enough once every few seconds you see the browser requesting the same image resource. Why? You see that the request is coming from JavaScript, so you set a breakpoint on the JavaScript to see what’s going on. After a few hours of debugging, you isolate the cause: the publisher installed a new JQuery widget that’s making our code go fubar. By the end of the day, you have the bug fix completed, and you’re ready to test on our QA servers. Once verified, you check into git, continuous integration does its thing, and we push the change live. This was a good start to the week because fixing that bug directly increased our revenue.
Tomorrow, you'll be using a network analyzer like Fiddler or Charles to examine packets going in and out of our own custom-written proxy server, to figure out why a third party service is returning an error code to the server side of the proxy server, which ultimately ripples back to the client as an error. That'll have you deep into HTTP headers, cookies, content encoding, whether query arguments are encoded properly, and more as you try to figure that one out. That'll be fun.
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Helpful skills - the more the better
AWS services including CloudFront, Athena, SQL, Lambda Functions, Python, Flask, React, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Agile Methodologies
A word from your potential manager
I've got 45 years of professional software development experience building some of the most successful and well known software in the world at companies like AT&T, Oracle, and Netflix, as well as numerous startups. This taught me that the best teams emerge when you bring together very talented software developers with the right combination of culture and process, and then something magical happens.
How To Apply
Please DO NOT submit a resume. Your application will be turned down if you submit a resume. Instead, please apply by emailing a cover letter, explaining how your background is relevant to this job description, and why we should consider hiring you. You can read more about our business at www.adtoniq.io, and feel free to comment on our business as well. If we think you're a good match, we'll schedule a 90 minute Google Zoom during which we can talk about the position, but the bulk of the time we'll pair to write some code together to see how well we can work together. During the Zoom, you'll be doing the driving and writing the code, but we'll be working together. If it's a go from both sides after that, we'll have additional interviews where we can explore the details of this position, culture fit, and our company.
Adtoniq is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Adtoniq are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to age, gender, gender identity, race, color, religion or belief, veteran status, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Adtoniq will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Adtoniq encourages applicants of all ages.
Please send applications to jobs@adtoniq.com
