Job Vacancy: Web Application Developer (Ruby on Rails)
Posted by Wordtracker on 21 March 2012
Wordtracker is a search marketing company that specialises in helping people get more traffic to their websites.
We're a well-known company, with a strong brand and a worldwide client-base. We are a self-sustaining business which has been running successfully for over 10 years - without a need for VC funding. We have an opportunity for a Web Application developer to join on a permanent basis. You will be looking for an opportunity to use your programming, systems engineering, testing and user interface design experience to develop world beating Ruby on Rails web applications in an agile environment. You may be an existing Rails developer or looking to move from another technology such as PHP or Python.
At Wordtracker we offer a great company culture. You will be based in a modern open-plan office - with exposed brickwork, lots of space and plenty of natural light - in north London (Kentish Town, about five minutes walk from the tube).
We work in a pretty casual environment with flexible working hours. The working day starts at 9.30am and we have standup every morning at 10am. We work 40 hours per week, with our lunch on Fridays being provided from a local organic cafe. Of course, there's always plenty of fruit and snacks in the office, a holiday allowance of 23 days a year and a contributory pension scheme. You'll be given a Macbook Pro to work on, with a 24 inch monitor.
Software is at the heart of the company. We work on interesting, challenging problems using Agile methodologies. We work in two week iterations, estimating in ideal days, TDD and we're very careful about the quality of our code. Each of our products has it's own internal customer with whom the developers work closely to develop new features and plan the future of the tools. You'll feel that your contribution makes a direct difference to the bottom line. We operate with a flat hierarchy and transparent finances. You'll always know how well we're doing and what the bottom line trends are.
We have several Rails 3 apps in production which are using some pretty interesting technologies in the Rails space, such as Resque, CoffeeScript and Sphinx. Our main keywords tool runs over 10,000 searches a day and our production infrastructure is spread over 14 machines. We're a sociable bunch of people - evenings out are a regular feature. It is important you want to work in a small, fast moving team where the pressure can be quite high and you feel there's a point to you turning up in the morning. It probably isn't a place where you can hide away churning out some code in your own little silo.
Ruby and Rails are obviously key technologies for this role. Most of our test code is written in test-unit with Shoulda and Mocha but we have some RSpec tests too. We also have some PHP and C++ code in production. We use MySQL (with Sphinx) for data storage and git for our versioning. Views are rendered with Haml. Front end skills – jQuery, Javascript, Html, Sass, CSS are also important.
Key skills for this role are:
- Experience of server-side programming
- Connecting software with business priorities.
- A pragmatic approach to software development.
- SQL experience, knowledge of hand-writing SQL queries and understanding of database schema design and optimization.
- Test driven development.
- Working with internal customers to estimate stories.
Salary: dependent on experience
If you feel you have what it takes to make this role a success please send your CV along with answers to the following questions to shane@wordtracker.com.
- What technology/open source projects do you follow and/or contribute to? Please provide links/details/source code
- What is your current approach to testing a web application stack? Where would you focus most of your testing effort?
Please note we do not accept CVs from Recruitment Agencies.
