Working for us
Jiva is a web technology start up based in the centre of Bristol, which has secured substantial angel investment. We believe passionately in the importance of good design at all levels from engineering up through interaction to produce web applications which meet a real need and which are a joy to use.
We are currently building Beanbag, an out of school learning network with an emphasis on open content. We are big users, and supporters, of open source. Beanbag is powered by Ruby on Rails and the rather wonderful Hobo framework. We believe that agility in our development processes and wider business operations is essential to effectively exploring new ideas and evolving a product.
Because creativity lies at the heart of what we do we encourage everyone who works here to spend 10% of their time on a personal project. This could be contributing to an existing open source project or working on your idea for the next big thing.
We are looking for people who are smart (or clever as we brits say) and get things done. We want to hear from people who are very good at what they do, are quietly confident in their abilities and are comfortable communicating with experts and laymen alike. We operate in a low-ego environment, so no prima donnas.
Who are we looking for?
We are particularly keen to find a couple of top notch developers. However, people are not fungible resources! We don't have a number of square holes that we want to find pegs to fit, but we do have a range of opportunities for a number of different people. We are not big on job titles and we are keen to find people who straddle disciplines and can be an effective part of our team.
We would value the following skills and experience:
- Experience with agile development processes such as Scrum, particularly agile testing.
- Ruby and Javascript are what we are currently using on Beanbag but we expect you to have experience with other languages too. Polyglots preferred.
- Experience, perhaps working in a startup, of balancing rapidity and flexibility with attention to detail and rigour.
- Experience of building web apps which scale to support serious loads.
- We expect you to have been involved in the development of multiple 'production' web apps, including at least one using Rails. You get extra kudos for demonstrable contribution to an existing open source project, or starting one.
- It goes without saying that front end development uses accessible, semantic markup to provide structure, enhanced with clean CSS for presentation and unobtrusive Javascript for behaviour. Progressive enhancement is the done thing.
In short you know your stuff.
For example if you write back end code we would expect you to know and be able to explain the difference between: static and dynamic typing; strong and weak typing; object oriented and functional programming. And to explain what design patterns are and when, why and how they might be useful.
If you do information architecture, interaction design or user experience design we would expect you to be able to talk intelligently about user centred design, service design, social software, participatory culture, pervasive media and how we weave technology into the fabric of our lives.
Whoever you are you need to be interested in building something that is 'of the web not just on the web'.
What do we offer?
- The chance to work on building web applications that meet real social needs in an atmosphere of creative collaboration using the best tools for the job.
- Flexible and responsible working patterns, avoiding 'crunch time' and including '10% time'.
- Decent holidays (30 days) and generous salaries (£30-50k). All the hardware, software and training you need to do your best work and to continue to get better at what you do.
- Settees, but no beanbags.
Interested?
If you are interested in working with us please drop me a mail — with a CV, links to your work and a few lines about why you think we would be a good fit for each other — at petef at jivatechnology dot com.
We're not setting a deadline because it's more important to us to find the right people than to find you by a certain date. But we do want to recruit as quickly as we can so the sooner you start a conversation the better.
No agencies thanks.
