Looking for good software engineers in Austin, Tx

 Ok, so they put a link to my blog on the corporate site, and while I've been blowing up twitter about the fact that we're hiring, I figured I'd make one little blog post about the fact that we're hiring, what we're looking for and how AWESOME this job is. Email me at eohara@whalesharkmedia.com if you're interested, or hit http://www.whalesharkmedia.com/careers_culture.html.

Why is WhaleShark awesome? 

Yeah, we hire interns too!

The deal industry is going nuts. It ain't no secret that the economy has seen better days, and consumers are trying how to buy more stuff with less money. So, yeah, we're killing it economically. How do I know? Well, every Tuesday, we have an all hands meeting, and they tell us actual numbers. It's really cool to work for a company where people start wondering what's wrong, when we only exceed forecast on revenue by 4 or 5%.

Our kitchen

The technology stack is pretty neat here. By "pretty neat", I mean AWESOME!  We use Voldemort for persistence. It's a distributed key/value store that's pretty nifty. We serialize everything using Google Protocol buffers (the value part of key/value). All queries (since you can't query a key/value store easily) are Solr. We also use the heck outta Amazon servies. We use Amazon S3 to store all sorts of data, SNS and SQS for pub/sub (see my WhaleBus post). We have massive amounts of data that we use Hadoop/Pig to process to get lots of cool analytics stuff. We've got sites in classic asp, asp.net 1.1, asp.net mvc, wordpress, LAMP - pretty much everything you can think of, and we make  all work together. In short, it's pretty freekin' cool. What's even cooler, is we'll keep getting more sites, the executive team is all about acquisition, so engineering has to stay agile. That's a good thing to me.

Yeah, that's Dublin baby!

Lunch is catered (at least) every Tuesday. The fridge is always stocked with frozen lunches, Blue Bell ice cream, bagels and waffles (for us morning guys), and lots of other goodies. And YES, to the right, that is a picture of Dublin Dr. Pepper on tap that you see. The office is, AMAZING. Glass conference rooms,  desks that promote pair programming and impromptu conversations, but still large enough that you can take a personal call and not let everyone know that your kid just got sent home for flicking a bugger on the teacher.  There's small couches all over the place so you can sit and talk about how awesome CQRS or why the Cowboys aren't gunna suck this year without the need to reserve some conference room. Oh yeah, there's usually beer in the fridge on Friday, and no one gives you crap if you drink it.

My Desk (and Pratik being awesome)

The culture at WhalesShark is another thing worth mentioning. I've been around the block a couple times.   Too many times I've seen a great company loose good engineers because of some silly political issues between product, engineering and executive staff. Cotter (our CEO) is amazing about NOT allowing that kinda thing, we have an open culture like I've never seen. Most (I think all) of our full time employees have options. So, we've all got a vested interest in the success, and we all work together at it.  We work hard, but have fun too. I'm the resident nerf dart expert, and as the Team Lead for the Internal systems team, it's not rare for Angie (one of the operations managers) to come shoot me with her nerf gun because one of the feeds imported a coupon wrong. We have a LOT of nerf gun wars actually.

Board Room

Conference room (and Jamie)

Elevator Lobby

 So what types of Engineers are we looking for?

• Passionate about their craft, someone who codes because they love it, not because it's their carrier.
• Is willing to step out of the comfort zone, and does. Someone who learns things because they want to.
• Someone who understands the importance of testing (I'm a TDD guy, and that's what I want, but it's not a must)
• Someone strong in OOP and Design (I'm a big DDD guy)
• Someone who is interested or has experience in distributed systems (CQRS is a big plus in my book)
• An awesome engineer - I WILL go through coding exercises with you, and if you think giant case statements are ok, then, move on :)
• A github account with some examples of stuff you've done is a big plus.

Ok... sorry for the spam! Back to coding for me! 

eohara@whalesharkmedia.com

http://www.whalesharkmedia.com/careers_culture.html.