Developer - Lead
Help wanted: a stellar coder who’s also a talented leader. Ontela is looking for an experienced development lead who enjoys helping other people write code as much as they enjoy writing it themselves. You’ll be guiding a major portion of our codebase through our 1.0 release (if you get here soon!) and on to many subsequent customer releases. You’ll be making substantial contributions yourself, plus doing all the things that great managers do –estimating the complexity of new projects, managing work across team contributors, working out simple solution frameworks to minimize project risk, and providing your team with inspiration, focus, moral support, and air cover to get the product done to spec and on schedule.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
First things first: you’ll need to be a stand-out developer who can lead by example. You technical design work is first-rate, your estimates are well-thought out, you dig in and get difficult code right time and time again when it counts, you spot potential problems and craft solutions to avoid them before they burn any customers, and you follow all the good development practices that smooth out the process of building products and services. You also need to be a terrific manager. At Ontela, that pretty much means people love working with you. You’re going to be leading a team where the average developer has 8 years of experience and is an order of magnitude more effective than the mean – so you’ll need to be, too. You’re also going to start building out our team with more new blood, so you should have a great track record of hiring college grads and up-and-coming engineers who turn in to superstars, as well as attracting and developing experienced professionals like yourself.
QUALIFICATIONS
This is a crucial position with significant responsibility and growth potential. We’re looking for experience in the following:
- Multiple full ship cycles with software products or web services used by at least tens of thousands of real customers – that is, you’ve rolled out products and services to full successful release
- 4+ years experience as a developer
- 2+ years experience leading a team of 3 or more developers
- Development skills that are up-to-date; for example, you must have written significant shipping or process critical code in the last year
- Current, expert-class skills in one of these
areas:
- Windows client applications (MFC/Win32 API)
- Windows server applications (C#, ASP.NET)
- Embedded/mobile applications (J2ME or BREW)
- Former colleagues who would eat hot lava for an opportunity to work with you again
- BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent years of experience
Also desirable, but not required:
- Experience working at both a startup and a large successful company
- Experience working with overseas teams (the majority of our work is done locally, though)
- A knowledge of good development practices found in a variety of methodologies (waterfall, XP, Scrum), but no dogma about any one
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 LD2007.ontela@hiredesk.net!