Seeking Crack Scala / Ruby engineer for ex-Googler startup — No Experience Necessary
Do you love Scala, functional programming, Lift, the social web, algorithms, machine learning, auctions, viral coefficients, optimization, behavioral finance, or some or all of the above? No experience with Scala but a crack developer and a quick study with new programming languages? Either way, read on... We are two ex-Google Product Marketers, and we're creating what we believe is a genuinely novel, social, well-branded, useful, and highly-monetizable app that leverages the best of Facebook's connection points. Unlike typical product managers, who tend to think narrowly about the product with their left-brains — how well it's designed, the evolution of its feature set, its market positioning against competitors — and believe users will just come if the product is good enough, we also engaged our right-brains thought through very subtle but powerful factors such as early-stage incentives, network effects, brand resonance, emotional attachment, social reinforcement, ease of customer acquisition via quantifiable channels, and the product's intrinsic viral potential/coefficient. We also have some killer potential names (and own the associated domain families). Like all new tech ideas, we are facing a significant risk of failure. The probability of success is admittedly low. But conditioned on that (potentially low) chance of success, the payoff will be very high – we're attacking a market of major size and one that has very attractive secular long-term growth dynamics, and our idea has broad applicability across customer demographics. We see our idea as a 'binary bet', and one that will take about 3-6 months worth of development time to determine the outcome. It's in the nature of the incentive structures we're building, the product's attachment and engagement methods, and user acquisition strategy, that if it "works", positive feedback will kick in quickly and the binary bet would pay off — potentially significantly. We're looking for three to four lead Scala / Lift / GWT frontend engineers to work closely with us on a contract basis for 12-24 weeks to build version 1 of the product. It's OK if you're still in school, as long as you can devote at least 15/hours a week to the project. We haven't raised money, and do not intend to at this early stage (we may be able to generate meaningful revenue even with a small number of users, as long as they are engaged with the product on a daily basis); that being said, we can afford to pay a high quality developer market rates (for early stage startups), and can offer equity as a "kicker" upon successful and satisfactory completion of the project. A bonus if you're a Masters student/graduate, have taken advanced programming languages/compilers classes, have done significant work in Scala / Lift before (or any other functional language), can implement basic machine learning algorithms, or have experience in one or more of the following fields: payments/transaction processing, online advertising, contextual targeting, auction dynamics, behavioral economics, computational game theory, operations research/supply-chain algorithms, NLP, collaborative filtering, graph theory, zero-knowledge proofs, or hidden Markov models. A big bonus if you've read Shannon's "Mathematical Theory of Communication", (This is not to say our product will include features from all these fields; we just highly value engineers with experience in any of these areas). It's also a big bonus if you have a good head for design and user experience. Major plus if you're a font-addict like we are :) If this sounds at all interesting and you'd like to hear more, please get back to me with your availability for a short chat, and forward your resume/cv/recent projects. Also tell me about what brought you to Scala (if you've used it before), how experienced you are with the language and the Lift framework, and what fields of either theoretical computer science or more pragmatic product development interest you the most. What does your dream software engineering job look like? What's your preferred engagement model (contract, hourly, project-based, part-time, full-time, cash, equity, a mix)? A short cover letter describing your background would help, too. As for us: We're two ex-Google guys with significant experience in web and non-web marketing. One of us sells his own line of furry sandals at http://www.bonsaisandals.com and sells Hamburger Phones (from the movie Juno) at http://www.thehamburgerphone.com – he started his first business from his dorm room in 2000, selling surplus consumer electronics and computer peripherals on eBay while taking a full engineering course load. The other one has marketing in his blood and has been thinking about interesting marketing issues from both a theoretical/academic perspective, and from a pragmatic, Google-marketing foot-soldier perspective for his entire career.
Thanks,
Alex
alex@bonsaisandals.com