seeking innovative and passionate engineers…

January 04, 2007

Once again, I’m hiring…. If you read this weblog and live in the SF bay area, maybe you want to work on my team. I’d also consider Chicago, since our team has one remote engineer there. We collaborate a lot, so it’s good to have time together in the office.

I haven’t taked much about what it is like working at Laszlo, but I haven’t had so much fun since I worked at CoSA building After Effects, and I’ve worked on some awesome teams doing ground-breaking work that has has wide effects across the industry. I like to work on stuff that will change the world. I don’t expect to eliminate world hunger or create peace in the middle east. It is not my calling to solve world problems on that scale. I write software, and my particular flavor of software creation is product development.

I like to ship software, which I was surprised to find is not important to all engineers, most notable folks in research. I like to build new and useful products. I love coding, but I’m not motivated to do it unless I believe it will someday be working its magic out in the world. I have had practice building software that runs on the majority of the world’s personal computers (Shockwave and Flash). However, for much of the last decade, I’ve been focused on server software. My career seemed to have an odd trajectory from UI design and development thru internet protocols to scalable server development and then back to UI now with declarative markup. Platforms and tools, graphics and video have been on-going themes, but those are hardly unifying principles. I’ve always said that I took jobs, first because of the people I want to work with, and second for the technology and products I would build. The actual project and company choice always felt a bit random. However, the way that the industry has evolved has made all of my experience fundamentally connected.

Ok, enough about me, but as the hiring manager I figured it would be relevant. I feel that every bit of my experience has led to this point: creating applications with innvative, beautiful, yet practical UI within a server-based service-oriented architecture. It is challenging work to combine solid back-end architecture with UI framework flexibility, creating both effective end-user applications and the framework that supports them at the same time. It is made even more challenging (and a bit stressful) by the fact that it will be deployed for millions of people to use every day. Having real customers with broad reach implies not only that we build a robust and scalable server, but also that we get the all the UI details right — small percentages are still lots of people.

I know the project description is a bit vague, but if it sounds interesting and you want to learn more drop me a note or just apply for one of these jobs:

* Passionate UI Wizard
* Innovative Server Engineer

Laszlo, is, of course an equal opportunity employer, but I would be particularly delighted to see more resumes from women :)

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