Wordtracker is a search marketing company that specialises in helping people get more traffic to their websites.
We're a well-known company, with a strong brand and a worldwide client-base. We are a self-sustaining business which has been running successfully for over 10 years - without a need for VC funding.
We have an opportunity for a Ruby on Rails team leader to join on a permanent basis. You will be looking for an opportunity to use your extensive programming and management experience to develop world beating Ruby on Rails web applications.
It is important you want to work in a small, fast moving team where you feel there's a point to you turning up in the morning. Your first task will be to expand our team by hiring two more developers, making a team of seven.
Software is at the heart of the company. We work on interesting, challenging problems using Agile methodologies. We work in two week iterations, estimating in ideal days, TDD and we're careful about the quality of our code. Each of our subscription products has its own internal customer with whom the developers work closely to develop new features and plan the future of the tools.
Ruby and Rails are key technologies for this role. We have three Rails 3 apps in production and we're using technologies such as Resque, CoffeeScript and Sphinx. Our main keywords tool runs over 10,000 searches a day and our production infrastructure is spread over 14 machines.
Most of our test code is written in test-unit with Shoulda and Mocha but we have some RSpec tests too. We also have some PHP code in production - skills in those technologies would be a definite plus. We use MySQL (with Sphinx) for data storage and git for our versioning. Views are rendered with Haml. Front end skills – jQuery, Javascript, Html, Sass, CSS are also important.
Key skills for this role are:
- A pragmatic approach to software development
- Experience of recruiting and managing a development team using genuine Agile methodologies
- Working with internal customers to estimate stories
- Generalist - knowledge of whole web stack including systems engineering, web server, database, programming, front end.
- Appreciation of test driven development
- An entrepreneurial attitude
At Wordtracker we offer a great company culture. You will be based in a modern open-plan office - with exposed brickwork, lots of space and plenty of natural light - in north London (Kentish Town, about five minutes walk from the tube).
We work in a pretty casual environment with flexible working hours. The working day starts at 9.30am and we have standup every morning at 10am. Our lunch on Fridays is provided from a local organic cafe. Of course, there's always plenty of fruit and snacks in the office, a holiday allowance of 23 days a year and a contributory pension scheme. You'll be given a Macbook Pro to work on, with a 24 inch monitor.
Salary: dependent on experience
If you feel you have what it takes to make this role a success please send your CV along with answers to the following questions to justin@wordtracker.com by 20th February.
- What open source projects/libraries have you contributed to? Please provide links/details/source code.
- What is your current approach to testing a complete web application stack including client-side code? Where would you focus most of your testing effort?
