David R. MacIver's Blog
Hey guys, we're hiring!
Good news everyone! We’re hiring!
...wait, who’s we?
I’ve not talked about it nearly as much as I always intend to (I have at least three related blog posts about it queued up in my mental drafts folder), but I’m currently working at Aframe (please ’scuse the not terribly informative website). We’re doing cool things for the video production world - helping you store your footage, find it again (unless you work in this world you’d be surprised how much this isn’t a solved problem) and make use of it throughout the entire production workflow. It’s exciting stuff, and we’re starting to gain some real traction.
We’ve been talking about hiring for a while. We’re a small team at the moment, and we’re really working at capacity (slightly over it really) - we’ve got a good product, but we’ve hit the stage where we now have to both a) Expand on its feature set and make it better rounded and b) Maintain what we’ve got. Improve reliability, fix bugs, and generally make it work better for our existing paying customers (yes, we have those. A refreshing change from some startups), and to do both well we need to increase our capacity.
Unfortunately we keep facing the problem of actually writing job specs. It’s hard, and the people best equipped to write the job specs are those of us already working at capacity.
So, this is me saying to hell with it. We’re not hiring job specs, we’re hiring people. The most important characteristics are not whether you fit into a box, they’re the following:
- You’re interested in what we’re doing.
- We get along with you.
- You’re a competent developer.
Although we need a range of skills, if you don’t have those three we’re not interested and if you do have those three we’re probably able to find something useful for you to do!
That being said, here are some things we’d be particularly interested in (none of them are requirements. You certainly don’t have to fit all of them).
- Video. We’re a video startup. We could always use more video dev experience. Pretty obvious really. Whether you’ve made contributions to open source video software or have got experience wrangling things through the various commercial behemoths in the industry, we’re interested.
- Front-end and design skills. At the moment we’ve got Mike Stenhouse carrying most of the front-end work. We’ve got Rey Dhuny and Stef Lewandowski, but Rey is mostly busy with the main site and other projects here and Stef is mostly busy with everything all at once. So right now Mike’s got more than the lion’s share of the work, and there’s only one of him. We’ve talked about cloning, but we’re not sure that the world is ready for two Mike Stenhouses and we’d love you to give us a second option.
- Dev-ops. We’re a big believer in this. There is not a separate species called “sysadmin”. The people building and maintaining your infrastructure should be part of your dev team, albeit with a somewhat different skill set. Right now we’ve got Jon Cowie covering half of this. He’s built us a great infrastructure, but he’s very much more ops than dev (we are slowly converting him, though he denies this). We could quite use someone to pick up more of the dev half of that. We need people good at diagnosing problems, fixing issues, building reliable systems, etc.
- Automation. A lot of what we do at Aframe is only semi-automated. We expect this to continue - much of it requires decision making, or requires tasks which are trivial for humans and open research programs for computers. One of our greatest strengths is that we’re entirely prepared to make a person do it when it’s hard for a computer to. But our humans are a scarce resource, and we don’t want to make their lives more difficult than they should be. If you’ve got experience taking manual processes and replacing them with a small shell script that would be great.
Some other by the ways:
- We’re mostly Ruby. We’re in principle open to other languages, particularly for high performance stuff, but it’s unlikely we’ll move away from Ruby as the main stack any time soon. While knowing Ruby isn’t strictly necessary (particularly for people more focused purely on the video), if you don’t know it you’ll need to pick it up pretty quickly.
- We do Agile. We’d like it if you do too.
- We like interesting people, and people who are interested. If you don’t have a passion for what you do, this is probably the wrong place for you.
Oh, and the people I mentioned above are not the whole dev team. We also have Marcus Baker, who we hired for the “Beard” job spec you might remember (which seems to have vanished off the internet. Sad. I might repost it for archive at some point), and a mysterious being known only as “Michael” who has successfully erased all evidence of himself from the internet. Really.
Anyway, I hope that sounds interesting to you. Feel free to ask me any questions (in comments, on Twitter, by email, whatever) and if you want to apply, drop us an email at jobs@aframe.com!
Comments
**__** on 2011-07-12 18:34:48:
I assume you’re hiring people in London only?
david on 2011-07-12 20:14:19:
Yes, sorry. Should have made that clear.