Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)

I interviewed with Game Closure for the engineering position. Passed 3 technical rounds with engineers and CEO, then was asked for reference. I agreed to provide my ex-boss's contact, they didn't call until more than 2 weeks later, then got a feedback that they received some "red flags" from the reference so they won't proceed. I couldn't believe it so I came to ask my ex-boss directly, whom I worked with for 2.5 years as lead developer and still maintain good relationship. He was shocked to hear that, and said he tried to give me the best feedback he could, then apologize and even tried to offer me some other gigs in exchange for the loss. Judging from the actions alone - GC had no desire to make the call until 2 weeks later and my boss trying to offer me jobs instead - I find it simply impossible to believe that GC had genuine interest in me and that my boss backstabbed me. If you don't want the candidate you should simply tell them, but if you can't find a good reason and decide to blame it on the reference despite the candidate's effort to provide whatever you need and risking their relationship, it tells a lot about you.

Cost of living is a lot lower. 25-30 days holiday a year + 10 bank holidays. Far less grindy hours (obviously varies from place to place).

The big money gigs are in London are in contracting, where people can make 500-1k a day for 3-6-12 month contracts. The market for that is far higher.

Imbellus | Senior Game Engineer | Location: Los Angeles, CA or Remote | Full-time | $100k - $150k | Experience: Mid Level to Principal Level

Imbellus Overview: We are looking for exceptional people who share our mission: to reinvent how we measure human potential. At Imbellus, we build technology-enabled assessments that evaluate how people think instead of what they know. We believe our society must prioritize developing minds that do what computers cannot. By changing assessments, we reorient the education system and employers to measure what matters.

We love this challenge. We know that what has worked for decades in other contexts, might not work in ours. So we don’t default on expertise, instead we test every assumption with logic, each idea with reasoning, and all conclusions with “prove it.” We choose learning over ego so that our product and our people become the best.

As an Imbellus Senior Game Engineer, you will envision how to translate feature designs into gameplay mechanics, and delight players with engaging moments. You will prototype and discover new solutions for complex systemic challenges, and orchestrate the game to ensure a flow state for the player. You will collaborate with engineers, designers, artists and learning scientists to apply playtest feedback and polish gameplay interactions to result in a high-quality user experience and effective assessment.

What you’ll be doing at Imbellus: - Create, refine and polish complex and varied gameplay systems - Prototype alongside the Game Designer to determine optimal strategies for creating a user experience that exceeds our players expectations - Help develop art pipeline tools that streamline our artists' processes and simplify building an awe-inspiring virtual world - Support the UI Designer in implementation, functionality, and feature integration - Document and peer review technical designs with engineering team - Innovate on technical challenges using state of the art engineering methods to automate development processes

What you’ll need to succeed at Imbellus: - 10+ years of software development experience overall - 5+ years working in the game industry - Expertise across multiple languages including Python, C++, and JavaScript - 1+ years experience with Unity a plus - Simulation experience a plus

Apply at Imbellus.com or contact Ryan Fitzpatrick on LinkedIn

Ozora Research | Engineers, Linguists | Berkeley, CA | Part-Time | Onsite | Equity

My company, Ozora Research, is developing a next-generation suite of Natural Language Processing tools centered around sentence parsing. We spend our time thinking deeply about the structure of language and then building statistical models that capture the structure. The requirements are: a good background in mathematics and statistics, and a deep interest in language and linguistics. Programming skill is a big plus, but not an absolute requirement.

I believe we are poised to make a huge dent in the world of NLP and linguistics. The field of automated parsing has been bogged down for the last 20 years because of its dependence on labelled training data (e.g the Penn Treebank). In my research I've discovered a way to circumvent that limitation, by building and evaluating sentence parsers using only a large amount of raw text data. I've spent the last couple of years validating the approach, and now that I'm confident it works, I'm looking to build up a team.

I have a nontraditional, minimalist and cockroachy business plan that won't appeal to everyone, but I can promise you that if I get rich you will also. I can also guarantee that you will get a ton of great experience that you would be tough to get at a big company. I want to especially encourage the following types of people to reach out:

- Recent grads in language-related fields who want to break into the software engineering industry

- People who have had some success in mainstream software engineering careers, but are looking to try something new

- People who want are thinking about going to graduate school in CS/ML/AI/NLP and want some experience doing research in that area

I'm happy to talk more about the specifics in person. Email me at daniel dot burfoot at gmail.

Visby | light field capture | visby.io | San Francisco (550 Bryant St) | Full-time | ONSITE | Mid to Senior Computational Geometer | $110-140k + equity DOE

What We Do: VC-backed seed-stage startup building natively holographic capture and playback for photographic quality VR, AR, etc. Goodbye, uncanny valley (hello, a lot of math). We're a software company, but we have a big pile of cameras. You can check out a 2D representation of one of our images at https://www.visby.io/fire

Stack: Python, C++, CUDA, Open GL, AWS.

The Team: There are ten of us total, seven on the engineering team. Our CEO and CTO make me laugh aloud on a regular basis.

Values: We're solving hard problems, so we value creativity, communication, and generosity in equal measure. We welcome a wide variety of personal and professional backgrounds and consider applicants without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual identity or expression, medical condition, socioeconomic status, or any other category of experience.

We're Hiring

• Software Engineer, Computational Geometry: https://bit.ly/2KHHyJa