Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)

A bit about us:

We built Harry’s with one simple belief: everyone deserves a great shave at a fair price. As such, we seek to provide our own brand of exceptional shaving products direct to our customers online. We launched on March 13th and have been humbled and flattered by the early customer response, and we're now looking to bring on more talented engineers to help make every one of our customers happy and change the world, one 5-o'clock shadow at a time.

We're looking for outstanding full stack engineers and data engineers who want to solve thorny e-commerce problems in {customer marketing, web performance, customer experience/support, operations, supply chain management} in innovative ways.

Technologies: our web site is built on Rails, we're hosted on Heroku, our data is stored in Postgres, and we write a lot of Python to consolidate data from various sources and analyze it.

For the full stack engineer who thrives on shipping features in the face of complex problems and processes:

Our custom e-commerce platform powers the entire business, from the HTML on our homepage all the way down to our supply chain. We’ve got fun problems to work out every day, at every level of the stack, all with the hope to make purchasing and shaving with us the best experience out there. We’re looking for someone genuinely excited by the opportunity to make millions of peoples lives easier and build the Harry’s platform of tomorrow. Your primary responsibilities will include:

  - Design and implement core features of the production website
  - Build infrastructure to support various external features and other units of the business
  - Think about performance all the time, and proactively make changes to make our platform better
  - Determine ways to operate more efficiently (e.g. optimizing our inventory and shipping algorithms)

Data plays an integral role at Harry's, informing every facet of our business. We are constantly working to understand the behaviors of tens of thousands of customers, tailoring offerings to them so that we can make them happy and drive continued demand. To that end, we're looking for a statistically-inclined software engineer who is well- versed in building data systems and wants to use data to inform decisions at Harry's in a forward-thinking way. Your primary responsibilities will include:

  - Build infrastructure to automate data collection, storage, processing, and presentation.
  - Instrument our website and marketing communications to gather the data we need.
  - Test changes we make to our site, emails, packaging, shipping options, -- everything, really -- relentlessly.
  - Produce, analyze, and present data to users in a context that allows them to make meaningful strategic decisions.
  - Use your sheer intellectual horsepower to figure out and communicate how to better delight our customers.

CB Insights is working on assessing the health of private companies using public data. We are National Science Foundation-backed but are otherwise proud to be bootstrapped, growing quickly and profitable.

We're hiring the following positions:

- Full stack developer - Tech industry analyst - Data journalist - Machine learning engineer - Inside sales analyst - Market research professionals

Details on the company and these jobs are here - http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/

Many positions! Help us continue to push watching both pro and personal video gaming main stream. We've hit on a strong product market fit and we're growing hand over fist right now. As such we have need for:

- backend engineers[1]

- product engineers[2]

We're analytical about the work that we do and you should be too. You should also care about getting things done right, and be pragmatic about when to choose speed over quality, if you opt for the former you're the type of engineer that makes a note that you shorted on quality and you'll come back and fix that up.

We keep small engineering teams (usually no more than 10 people per team), this permits us to own what we work on. It is one of the best things about working here in my experience!

The low down on the positions:

[1] - Backend Engineers

With 30m MAU (last published number... it is bigger now!) our backend engineers work to keep our service humming along with five nines of uptime. Your work would include not only improving core pieces of infrastructure but also envisaging new pieces that we do not have yet that will help take us to the next level. Some examples of things that have been done recently:

- migration to ruby 1.9

- built out a new IRC chat server which handles ~1000 qps. Best thing here is we slotted this in and no one noticed (except that chat was more stable, etc).

- Created a brand new API to access our data, this is used by Activision (Call of Duty: Black Ops II), EA (EA origin) and PlanetSide II, Smite, amongst a wide array of other game devs.

- Replaced a core piece of infrastructure used to let us know what streams are live, and what content they have on them. Again, this has been done without anyone noticing - its main win was taking us from needing 8 app servers to being able to handle all the load on one, but we run a couple of resilience.. naturally

We've a bunch of other coolness in the pipeline.

[2] - Product Engineers

One of the reasons we're growing so fast is that we're starting to churn out high quality features and general product improvements. There is still so far to go, the twitch you see now is as a result of dedicating much of our engineering work to scaling, in that time we've hired some kick ass product engineers and they're starting to push us forwards. Some things we've worked on recently:

- migrating site over to emberjs

- "Turbo" - ad free watching on all channels

- key product improvements: vod watching, vod creation

- new flash player - faster, less resource intensive, easier to build new features on

- payment provider integrations - aiming to make it as easy to pay in various geos as is possible.

We've a bunch of other coolness in the pipeline! (yes, there is an echo in here...).

Feel free to hit me up if you're interested / have questions / want a tshirt, etc, I head up our engineering team: ossareh at twitch.tv

http://www.optimalsocial.com/

Vision - Optimal, Inc. provides unparalleled audience data to help marketers manage and optimize their social advertising campaigns, all in real-time. Optimal was named the 9th fastest-growing, privately-held company in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011 by the San Francisco Business Times and PwC. We are a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and are working closely with other major social networks, but our vision is a more general one – to be the numerati behind what it means to engage in a world where people are voluntarily social and highly mobile.

Culture - We are growing very rapidly and occupy a unique position in the social advertising ecosystem. Optimal is seeking top-caliber, motivated individuals who view optimality as a way of being, whose curiosity embraces both theory and practicality, and who are enthusiastic about applying their talent to the future of social media: open graphs, real-time, big data, and word-of-mouth at scale. Our culture is built around an intelligent and professional look at the wider world of online and social media, but we are also a group that doesn’t take ourselves too seriously. If you want to work with smart people and change social marketing forever, come and join us!

We're currently seeking candidates for these positions (H1B welcome): Java Engineer and Cloud Ops Engineer.

We're also hiring for non-technical roles within Operations and Sales (i.e. Account Managers, Analysts, Social Media Analyst Interns, and Business Development Directors).

Check it out and apply here! - http://www.optimalsocial.com/careers/

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out directly to me: derek AT optimalsocial dot com.