Somewhere between a Navy Seal and cannon fodder, you will be leading our product charge from the very, very front. Your job is simple: bang out prototypes, sales demos, one-offs, proof-of-concepts and whatever else we need with lightning speed. It won’t need to be pretty; it just needs to work. You won't be part of development team exactly; they’re building a carrier-grade high reliability service that will be used by millions. You won't be part of the sales team exactly; you won't be called on pitch customers (although you may help out with the technical parts of some presentations). You’ll be the one building product demonstrations so the rest of the company can follow your lead (or run from the experiment).
WHAT YOU’LL DO
You may be doing some or all of the following. Experience is good; quick study is better!
- Modifying cell phone (BREW, J2ME, Windows Mobile, or Symbian) code to do new cool stuff
- Tweaking our Win32 client to change the functionality
- .NET server side experimentation to adjust the back end
- Bug investigations, quick fix engineering patches, and anything else necessary to keep our closed trial customers happy
- UI prototypes
- Flash-based concept demonstrations
- Technical documentation to help the sales team out
- Screen scraping and API hacking to mash up our service with web imaging services
- Something we haven’t thought of yet, using whatever technology you think best
You’ll also be a “tiger team of one” keeping our beta users happy. We know, it’s more fun to be coding the latest cool demo than fixing problems in the field, so you’ll build some automated tests to keep an eye on things and quickfix any trial-specific bugs that make their way through..
Finally, you’ll also help with some ongoing development housekeeping – if there’s an automated test script to be written or a web site component to be built, you’ll be on deck to do it.
Moderate travel (15%) may be required to get the job done – flying out to install something for a customer, for example, or coming along on to a tradeshow to make sure everything works. Also, as a young startup, we do work long hours-not just nine-to-five. In some cases, you may even need to be available during weird hours, for example if the team is off demoing in a strange time zone.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
Breadth over depth; smarts over experience; speed over quality--no point in beating around the bush. You are fluent in many technologies and a very quick study. You code constantly, for fun, and find the first 80% of the project to be vastly more interesting than the last 20%. You code fast, reuse where you can, and wind up with something that’s pretty darn good the first time around.
You must have experience in the following:
- Lots and lots of software written, including fun projects on your own time. We’ll ask to see them.
- Either a degree in a technical field, or equivalent experience.
We think you’ll also demonstrate the following traits:
- Passion for building cool stuff, fast.
- Commitment to building the near-impossible, just in the nick of time.
- Insight to understand what’s being asked for, design it, get feedback, and build it right the first time.
- Experience in getting things done fast and effectively.
- Startup experience and/or mindset
- Intelligence and creativity to figure out shortcuts, hacks, simple workarounds, and other tools of your trade.
Ontela is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. This job description is also available in convenient PDF form here. If this sounds like you, we want to hear from you, so please send your resume and a cover letter to jobs@ontela.com!