Brad Feld

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Desperately Seeking Awesome Software Artists

Mar 19, 2008
Category Random

One of our new investments – based in the Los Angeles area – is looking for some hardcore software folks.  The company has provided the following job descriptions.  If you are interested, have serious software experience, and are either based in the LA area or willing to relocate, drop me an email with a resume / bio / cv / links to stuff you’ve done.

The following job descriptions are as creative as the amazing folks behind the company:

  1. Software person with experience designing large-scale platforms and managing code for release. So someone with both good architecture chops and the willingness to say: hey, now, you’re not allowed to add that class into any repository I merge with unless you’ve tested for memory leaks on the playstation III, matey. Or you walk the plank. (So, I guess, fluent in Pirate, too.)
  2. Hacker who’d be excited about writing production-quality code for our low-level algorithmic runtime, plus all the visualization and management apps that let us see what the system is doing. So, good coder, strong math background a big plus though not necessarily essential (we have pure algorithm folks for this person to work closely with); strong design sense a big plus.
  3. A mathematical modeler to add to our growing collection would be great. (Buy three lapsed physicists right now, by calling this toll-free number, and we’ll throw in a lifetime supply of unscented Kalman filters, absolutely free. And that’s not all …) Sometimes what we do looks a little like machine vision work; sometimes it feels a little like information optics; some days we just wander around mumbling "Clifford algebra… 5D conformal isometries… pesky k-blades" and bumping into walls. Experience in these vicinities is fabulous, though also not actually necessary; thus far none of our approaches has been a standard one.
  4. The kind of hacker who likes TCP/IP stack optimization, and absolutely loves filesystem design work.
  5. UI designer/hacker with a deep and abiding love for C++. We have a very nice library that encapsulates basic pixel-pushing in 3d space. We need to expand that into a full GUI tool-kit. The two catches are: 1) nothing in our world has a direct precedent in today’s mouse-driven guis, so we’re inventing this stuff as we go; 2) the nature of the thing is that you have to be happy hacking on the C++/OpenGL level to build the actual production-quality widgets other folks will use. And performance matters a lot, despite plentiful assertions to the contrary among those of us lucky enough to have forgotten that there are problems you can’t parallelize just by adding round-robin DNS to your Apache config.
  6. A pitiless abuser of scripting language implementations. We want to write a great set of Ruby bindings for our platform. Excitingly, this is a terrifically delicate job, requiring that we craft Ruby->C[++] bindings for the entire library set and at the same time that we enable a large proportion of library functionality to be extended in Ruby. (Callbacks, call-outs, oh my.) And it should all feel like Ruby, so good dynamic inheritance and little-language feel are a must.

I can also assure you that a love of sushi, amazingly spicy chinese food, weird music / movies / fiction, and twisted nerd humor are critical attributes.