We're Spantree, a small and nimble boutique consultancy based mostly in Chicago. We're looking for another smart person to join our team in the West Loop. This candidate should enjoy learning new things and solving hard problems. Ideally, we're looking for a broad-range generalist with deep expertise in at least one area.
We work quite a bit with OSS and we're not shy about jumping into other people's code to figure things out. We constantly hunt for smarter ways to do things, so we're often experimenting with emerging tech with little or no documentation. You should be motivated to submit pull requests and hunt down project committers on Twitter and IRC when you're stuck.
- A nice person
- An effective communicator face-to-face, on the phone and over the web
- A pragmatic engineer that can quickly go from problem to solution to working software
- A lazy programmer who leverages test, build and deployment automation wherever possible
- An opinionated teacher of what they know and a humble student of what they don't
- An altruist who wants to participate in open-source projects
- One or more fun languages: Ruby, Python, Groovy, Clojure, PHP, CoffeeScript, etc.
- One or more boring languages: Java, C++, C#, etc.
- One or more web frameworks: Grails, Rails, Django, SpringMVC, Play, CakePHP, etc.
- One or more databases: SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL, we like it all.
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript and at least one framework: jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, ExtJS, Backbone, Angular.js, etc.
- Git, or a colorful excuse for not knowing it.
- The typical software development toolchain: text editors, IDEs, step debuggers, issue trackers, etc.
Our clients range from small and scrappy startups to large insurance companies. We have about 6 or 7 projects going at any point in time. Historically, most of the stuff we've worked on has not been public-facing: it's either guarded behind the client's firewall, neatly tucked away as a library or jammed into the minds of the developers we've mentored. But we're starting to diversify from "behind-the-scenes" work to more early-stage product development. Our ideal blend is probably 50/50.
Helping people make better decisions is the central theme of most of our projects. This can take the form of a search engine to help people find interesting stuff to do on a Saturday night, a complex workflow management system for evaluating health insurance claims or a matchmaking and scheduling system to help people book face-to-face meetings at conferences.
We're constantly on the lookout for new customers with hard problems to solve; customers on a mission to make life a little easier for their developers, their users and the world.
As mentioned before, we are constantly on the hunt for better ways of doing things. Here's a list of some of the technologies, in no particular order, which we commonly work with. We're not married to them, nor do we claim to be experts on all of them, but we're looking for people interested in them.
An (awesome) programming language that compiles down to Java bytecode.
A rapid application development framework for Groovy.
A DSL-based build system for Groovy.
A Selenium-backed Browser automation library for Groovy.
A full-text searching library.
A battle-tested search service that runs on top of Lucene.
An emerging, more RESTful search service that also runs on top of Lucene.
A MapReduce-based distributed processing framework.
A rules engine, event-processing, temporal reasoning and automated planning toolkit.
PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB2 and Oracle mostly.
A non-relational document database.
A high-performance graph database.
A persistent-capable distributed caching system.
A modern language that transpiles to readable JavaScript.
A high-throughput, language-agnostic messaging system.
A (non-terrible) bulk and batch processing pipeline.
A client-side MVC framework for JavaScript (though its technically MV*).
A data-driven visualization library for JavaScript.
A continuous integration build system.
A software quality and static analysis toolkit.
A Devops-friendly automated deployment and provisioning toolkit.
Drop us a line at [email protected] and tell us a bit about yourself. If you have a resume or CV, feel free to pass that along as well; but we won't hold it against you if you don't. Github and LinkedIn profiles are also helpful. We're looking forward to hearing from you!