We are looking for a great development manager with lots of experience in rapid iteration delivery. The focus of this position is developing and deploying the front end of our data rich web application.
We have great technology, great data, a great idea and great backing. As an agile web start-up, we work together to solve big data and user experience problems. We are all passionate about the web, about open data, about user experience and about using all of these things to build a business that will make a real impact on the economy. We are looking for someone who shares our passions and has the skills to help build and manage our small but talented team.
What we need is a great development manager with lots of experience in rapid iteration delivery. The focus of this position is developing and deploying the front end of our data rich web application. You will be expected to lead on the thinking, to cut code and maximise the skills of the team. You will have built successful teams of developers before. You will work closely with our CTO (more on him below) to contribute to the architecture decisions and be responsible for delivery of the product applications and their features. We are interested in someone who is exceptional at getting the best out of their team along with natural talent and great attitude - not just years of experience.
Responsibilities
Building and managing a Drupal-based development team to deliver a robust and scalable product.
Requirements
Experience building a team, with agile methodologies
You will have built a successful Development Team before and you will have done great things with that team, deploying web applications that you are really proud of. It will be second nature to you to deliver great quality products on time. You will be used to the Agile process and be comfortable using Kanban, Scrum or XP.
Experience building sites with Drupal
Of course!
What you’ve produced is more important than how long you’ve been doing it, but as a benchmark you should probably have about 5 years experience with Drupal. And it goes without saying that we’re not talking about just switching on a few modules; you’ll need to have:
• built themes from the ground up;
• created modules;
• evaluated and chosen (and then possibly modified) other people’s modules;
• be familiar with the latest techniques, such as Features and Context (or tell us why we should use something different).
By the way, we’re using Drupal 6 for now.
Experience of reliable deployment
You’ll also be familiar with frequently deploying your sites to the cloud, preferably to Amazon, and preferably with Chef. If you have Puppet experience we’re not going to argue with you, but the key thing is to be familiar with the ideas of deploying with version controlled scripts -- we use Git and GitHub -- rather than by hand.
(And if you have Vagrant experience you’re going to be off the brownie point scale.)
Experience of JavaScript and libraries
Drupal is great and all, but as you know a lot of front-end work nowadays requires a knowledge of JavaScript, or to be more precise, it requires a knowledge of certain JavaScript libraries. Again results speak louder, but as a benchmark we’ll be looking for at least 2 years with one of the main libraries, such as jQuery or YUI.
As to graphics, we’re still open. It’s not a must, but if you have experience with Flot, GViz, gRaphael, or one of the many others, you’ll be accumulating those valuable brownie points.
Collect more brownie points
If you have familiarity with the semantic web, that will be useful. Added some RDFa to a site? The points are going up. Experience with a graphics library is also useful. And if you can roll your sleeves up and use some of the programming languages we’re using server-side -- such as Java and Python -- you’re going to have a ton of those points.
None of these are show-stoppers though, and if you don’t have semweb experience and have been thinking about making the jump, then this is your chance to get on board.
What We Offer
• A dynamic, motivated and incredibly talented team with ambition to disrupt through technology, data and user experience
• An opportunity to be a part of building something very big and very bold.
• A salary and options - of course ;-)
Additional Bonus
You will be working with a team that has significant experience in successfully building technology businesses. Our CTO Mark likes to bring seemingly disconnected worlds together. As an invited expert at the W3C he invented RDFa to bring HTML and the semantic web together, he wrote the JavaScript library backplanejs, to merge XForms with JS, and now he wants to take the best from the semantic web and Hadoop and make them play nicely together. Join our team and you can be sure that you’ll always be at the cutting edge.
Contact brett@forsythgroup.com