Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2013)

Our web application is at the heart of our busy e-commerce business; every day it serves millions of product images and handles thousands of purchases - but we can and do update the live site with new code anytime we want without missing a beat. Our systems are written on the LAMP stack and we are migrating to Symfony 2 as our MVC framework. Developers choose the tools that work best for them - for instance, we have a mix of Linux and Mac workstations in the team. We are adopting and adapting agile development techniques such as test-driven development, pair programming, and continuous integration. We hold regular retrospectives to improve our working environment and lightning talks to share cool ideas whether work-related or not. Our developers are generalising specialists whose typical day may include refining an algorithm, writing a tricky integration test, tuning a SQL query, and discussing feature nuances with a product manager. Our team is growing fast and we'd like to hear (at careers@secretsales.com) from any of you who'd like to join us; we're hiring for all technical roles.

Established in London in July 2007, Secretsales.com is one of the UK's leading private shopping clubs, offering limited-time online sales with current name-brand goods at deep discounts. Brands include fashion, beauty, homeware, and lifestyle categories, many familiar from the high street. The company has about 80 employees and a substantial annual turnover. The firm is growing quickly after a recent investment round.

We are looking for Big Data Engineers, Data Hackers and Machine Learning Pragmatists. Example job description here: http://bottlenose.com/jobs/senior-big-data-engineer. But if you are hungry for challenges in the intersection of Big Data / Machine Learning. Talk to us. Contact me at dominiek at bottlenose dot com (Recruiters NOT OK).

Bottlenose is headquartered in LA with a large part of the development team in Amsterdam. Technologies we use: Cassandra, Storm, Hadoop, MongoDB, Node.js.

Our Vision:

The Stream. It's what matters now. From email to tweets, from forum postings to customer complaints, from enterprise social to automated systems monitors, the drivers for business are now in vortex of voices reflecting markets, internal morale, innovation, brand equity, product acceptance, politics and threats. Rational intend has shifted to irrational actions. Understanding the past bares no guarantee for the future. Understanding what's actionable in streams after-the-fact is expensive. Even dangerous.

This new paradigm requires new tools and methods that can make sense out of the stream and understand human emotion. Bottlenose’s core technology - StreamSense - creates a virtual mind map of everything people pay attention to. It is a new kind of database to derive powerful new insights. StreamSense gives organizations the emotional intelligence that they didn’t have before. It allows them to sense what people are feeling and to anticipate the unknown unknowns - both the good and the bad.

Attempts at creating machine understanding of our world like the Semantic Web and the Knowledge Graph have failed due to two fundamental flaws: 1) A model of the world is not something that should be derived from documents written by experts; 2) In order to build a ‘global brain’ you need to understand human emotion and human intend.

Bottlenose’s ultimate mission is to create a global artificial brain. This global consciousness is build out of a continuous stream of human conversation and attention. By analyzing these vast amounts of data and by analyzing the emotions around it, we build up a mental model of the world. We think this will give us a shot at creating an incredibly powerful Artificial General Intelligence.