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.

One of our investments is looking for a couple of strong web API engineers to help them integrate with a variety of existing public web APIs (services like digg, flickr, twitter, etc…). They’re looking to fill these positions in the Boulder area. Feel free to respond to me directly and I’ll forward inquiries along, or just checkout their posting at: https://boulder.craigslist.org/eng/607991214.html

On Google Blogoscoped, I ran into a post titled The Tools Google Uses Internally that is a short overview of a web seminar that walks through the tools a typical Googler works with daily.  This led me to the actual presentation (59 slides – many of them screenshots) which I found fascinatingly detailed.  If you’ve heard of MOMA, Snippet, and Ideas but never seen screenshots, now you can join the magic special club.

My friends over at Intense Debate are looking for a Technology Evangelist, Systems Administrator, and Software Engineer.  If you are interested, drop them an email at jobs@intensedebate.com.

While you are at it – if you are a blogger and like comments – give Intense Debate a try.  The Foundry Gang has had it on our blogs (Feld Thoughts, AsktheVC, Foundry Group, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Ross Carlson) for a while and we are all digging it.

My friends at Lijit are looking for a  Database Architect/Administrator, Java Developer, Web Developer, and a UI Web Developer.  If you are interested, send a resume to jobs at lijit dot com.  In addition to being at a super cool high growth place to work, you get to be one floor above me in downtown Boulder.  If you end up getting a job at Lijit via this blog post, tell me and make me take you to Amante for a gelato. 

This was so predictable.  As I mentioned in my post from a few weeks ago titled Can I Have Some More Crack Please?  I am not a macroeconomics guy.  I don’t watch the market nor do I watch TV news.  However, I do get WSJ.COM alerts (mostly for my own amusement to see what they think is worth emailing out alerts about.)

Here was today’s:

Feb. 5, 2008

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 370 points, or 2.9%, as investors’ anxiety about a possible recession flared following a bleak reading on the U.S. services sector and cautionary language about the economic outlook from a Federal Reserve official. It was the worst performance of the year so far for the blue-chip average in both point and percentage terms. Other major benchmarks also sold off dramatically. The S&P 500 Index plummeted by 3.2% and the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 3.1%.

I guess the crack high has worn off and it’s time for another hit.  Rate cute anyone?

I must have Microsoft / Yahoo / Google on my mind this morning.  Micah Baldwin has written a delicious scorpion / frog parable about M/Y/G.  Until four minutes ago, I thought The Scorpion and the Frog was an Aesop fable, but now due to the beautifulness and truthfulness of all things wikipedia, I now know that it’s the basis of the plot for the Star Trek: Voyager: Scorpion.  You – dear reader – might remember it from Natural Born Killers or The Crying Game.

I’ve been chewing on what to say about the Microsoft / Yahoo merger and its impact on entrepreneurship and – more specifically – Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.  I was finally gearing up to splat out some of my thoughts on paper, but after reading Marc Andreessen’s brilliant post titled Silicon Valley after a Microsoft / Yahoo merger: a contrarian view, I don’t have to.  While I don’t agree with 100% of the things Marc says, he covers all the ground I would have an just saved me 30 minutes of writing.

Zimbra just released v5.0.  For those of you that don’t know Zimbra, it’s a Microsoft Exchange / Outlook competitor that Yahoo bought last year for $350m.  While v5.0 looks nifty, I was thinking about the release notice to Zimbra customers for Zimbra v6.0, which I assume will be released after Microsoft completes their conquest acquisition of Yahoo (for those of you that live under a rock in a cave, Microsoft made an offer to acquire Yahoo last Friday for $45b.)

Following is an approximation of what I expect a Zimbra customer to receive regarding an upgrade.

Some date, 2010

Dear Microsoft Zimbra Customer:

The latest release of Zimbra (Zimbra 6.0) has been released to manufacturing today and will be available within 60 days.  As part of this release, we are renaming Zimbra 6.0 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.  The upgrade will be automatically delivered as part of your Zimbra license (sublicensed under the Microsoft Live Enterprise Support Service.)

If you are running the Zimbra desktop client, it will automatically be deleted and upgraded to Microsoft Outlook. If you are running the Zimbra Windows Mobile client, it will automatically be deleted and upgraded to Windows Mobile Mail.  If you are running any of the other Zimbra clients, including ones for Palm, Symbian, iPhone, or Blackberry, they will simply stop working and you will need to upgrade to a Windows Mobile Device.

Please back up your data as we can not assure you that it will be transferred.