Job Vacancy: Experienced Web Application Developer (Ruby on Rails)

Posted by Justin Deaville on 25 Sep, 2012
View comments Wordtracker News
Rails Web application developer position in London

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.

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) and MongoDB for data storage and git for our versioning. Views are rendered with Haml.

We are looking for a back end developer with strong front end skills. Our ideal candidate:

  • Is familiar with or have used front end frameworks (Backbone, Knockout, etc.)
  • Writes sensible CSS and JavaScript
  • Does not abuse Haml and/or Sass
  • Is crazy about quality and efficiency of the code
  • Knows what deterministic algorithm means
  • Is programming language agnostic but in love with Ruby
  • Realises why-when-where not to use Rails
  • Is keen to learn and share his knowledge with others
  • Has installed all the dev tools on home computer
  • Accepts Agile and TDD as a common sense
  • Knows what makes a bad test
  • Is constantly willing to improve team's workflow

Salary: excellent rate, dependent on experience

If you feel you have what it takes to make this role a success please send your CV to justin@wordtracker.com.

Please note we do not accept CVs from Recruitment Agencies.

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