Careers at Salad Labs

Before we get into specific job descriptions, we should mention some of our recruiting ground rules:

We fill jobs by looking for people who are the best equipped to solve certain types of problems over the course of months and years. We’re not especially hung up on years of experience, programming language names, or what your job title was at Microsoft. (In fact, we occasionally hire people who didn’t even work at Microsoft.) Our job descriptions detail the types of problems you will be asked to solve in your job function. If these are the types of problems you want to be solving, it’s up to you to tell us why you’re going to kick ass at solving them.
We believe that smart, motivated, creative people can learn just about anything, and quickly. When hiring, we try to err on the side of smart.
This is an entrepreneurial venture, and we look for people with an entrepreneurial spirit — people who are willing to be accountable, take the lead, take measured risks, and get things done. Note that, in this context, “entrepreneurial spirit” is not code for “does not play well with others.” We work as a team, and we hire nice people.
FABIPI runs the show.

We’ll also briefly touch on the things you’ll get to do if you work for us:

Solve cool problems, any way you want. (Within reason.) If you have a crazy idea that just might work, you can probably try it here. Creativity is encouraged.
Play a role across different departments. Our dev team is welcome to stop by our marketing meetings and toss out ideas. Our social media team knows what a staging environment is. Everyone’s input is considered in product decisions.
Learn new things. We’re too small a company to waste smart people on the things they already do well. We’ll put your brain to work on anything and everything that needs thinking about, and we’ll take your input seriously. We’ll give you room to hone a new skill set, whether that’s a new programming language or media outreach. We believe one way to find an innovative solution to a difficult question is to pose it to someone who’s never thought about it before.
Wear anything you want to work. We only wear formal business attire on the day a new intern starts. Because interns are adorable.

Able to design, write, test, deploy and maintain high quality efficient code within weekly iteration schedules.
Grasp project scope and break down medium-to-small sized user stories into detailed and effective development tasks.
Collaborate with mid-tier coders to collaborate and integrate work.
Thrive in a daily-standup environment where impediments are freely shared, and collaborative problem solving is the guiding esprit de corps.
Provide feedback and alternatives to product owners that help balance technical complexity with business value.
Be already comfortable (or get there quickly) with an open source back-end stack including Linux/CentOS, Apache, MySQL, Nutch/Solr, Hadoop, Perl and shell scripting.
Identify issues with and suggest strategies and opportunities to upgrade, re-architect or re-platform key elements of this stack.

Challenges you’re likely to solve in this role :

Designing to others’ and designing our own internal APIs.
Tackling scalability from the network, systems, database, application and web tiers
Integrating with social media (Facebook/G+/Twitter)
Building targeted, vertical search crawlers
Search indexing and search results management
Sentiment Analysis, and Machine Learning
Analytics, testing and decision software
Data warehousing and mining
Mathematical and statistical analysis
Post-relational data storage and processing
Building a game-based social graph

Able to design, write, test, deploy and maintain high quality efficient code within weekly iteration schedules.
Grasp project scope and break down medium-to-small sized user stories into detailed and effective development tasks.
Collaborate with a designer, and other coders to collaborate and integrate work.
Thrive in a daily-standup environment where impediments are freely shared, and collaborative problem solving is the guiding esprit de corps.
Provide feedback and alternatives to product owners that help balance technical complexity with business value.
Be already comfortable (or get there quickly) with an open source (LAMP) stack including Linux/CentOS, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Symfony
Identify issues with and suggest strategies and opportunities to upgrade, re-architect or re-platform key elements of this stack.

Challenges you’re likely to solve in this role :

Helping design internal APIs that perform well and securely (using AJAX/JSON/XML/CSS)
Implementing various caching strategies to build a blazing fast and efficient web app
Tackling scalability from the database, application, web server tiers
Integrating with social media (Facebook/G+/Twitter)
Building conceptual frameworks and algorithms that implement game dynamics
Front-end analytics, testing and decision software
Defining and building a universal client strategy (mobile, web, Facebook, Google+)
Coding dynamic game elements with a focus on playability

Able to design, write, test, deploy and maintain high quality efficient code within weekly iteration schedules.
Grasp project scope and break down medium-to-small sized user stories into detailed and effective development tasks.
Collaborate with a designer, and other coders to collaborate and integrate work.
Thrive in a daily-standup environment where impediments are freely shared, and collaborative problem solving is the guiding esprit de corps.
Provide feedback and alternatives to product owners that help balance technical complexity with business value.
Be already comfortable (or get there quickly) with an HTML/CSS/PHP stack including 960.gs/Blueprint, JQuery, PHP/Symfony, HTML/HTML5
Identify issues with and suggest strategies and opportunities to upgrade, re-architect or re-platform key elements of this stack.

Challenges you’re likely to solve in this role :

Helping design flexible, usable, and portable user interfaces (CSS/HTML5/JQuery)
Implementing various caching strategies to build a blazing fast and efficient web app
Tackling scalability from the web server, web browser, and mobile/tablet tiers
Front-end analytics, testing and decision software
Defining and building a universal client strategy (mobile, web, Facebook, Google+)
Coding dynamic game elements with a focus on playability and portability

Those rare candidates that can operate across two or more of these areas are enthusiastically encouraged to apply!