Web app developers in Vancouver wanted (Rails, JS)

JOB POSTING
Zeta Project

NOTE: this is a full-time position. Oursourcing firms or permanent contractors need not apply.

We are looking for skilled Ruby on Rails / JavaScript Web Developers.

isoHunt.com is among the largest 150 websites in the world. We are a fast growing start-up that thinks P2P and social networks are just the beginning. Our mission is to aggregate, personalize and publish the world's information.

We are hiring full-time developers to help build our next generation web community projects (tangential, but not directly related to isoHunt.com). Preference given to developers living in/will move to Vancouver, where we are located, although not required.

You will be working with a small team of dedicated developers. Everyone at our company is either a programmer or an admin. Your involvement will have a direct effect on the future of the company and the Web, and your contributions will always be noticed and appreciated. You have significant leeway to solve problems the best way you see fit, and your input will always be considered for design and architecture decisions. Creativity, intelligence and ability to learn are highly valued.

Other benefits include:

* Flex-location (there is no office, only occasional meetings are needed, most of the time we communicate via IRC or skype)
* Flex-time (work whatever time is best for you, and no, you don't need to keep hours. We do have online office/collaboration hours however)
* Full dental and extended medical, with perks like free massages (if you live in Canada)
* (and if you don't, we'll cover the cost of moving here, the best place to live in the world)
* Old hardware keeping you down? We'll pay for half of any work-related hardware upgrades / macbook purchases you need to make, yours to keep!
* Our wonderful crack-team of server admins keep the dev servers running smoothly so YOU never have to worry about keeping the mongrels barking ever again!
* Free whiteboards!

About Zeta Project (what you'll be working on)

It is a Ruby-on-Rails web application. Your Ruby-fu should be strong. We favor the thin-controller / fat-model school of thought. To that effect, we separated permissions into its own layer to keep things tidy. We designed our controllers to be RESTful and as uniform as possible (for instance, almost all exceptions are handled the same way across controllers). We use PostgreSQL and memcached for data storage and cache. The application is being designed to scale across a clusters from day 1, both for relational data (PostgreSQL) and mass storage (using MogileFS, and yes, we have good reason for clustered storage). We use Lucene / Ferret to handle search. We rely on high performance and relevant fulltext search, so both research and practical experience around this area are very big pluses. (particularly with Lucene)

Our application is also composed of copious amounts of JavaScript, for a highly interactive user interface. Familiarity with all its gory details, including the prototype object model and all the functional-programming aspects, as well as browser quirks (bonus points for experience with performance gotchas like IE memory-leaks) and the hairier parts of the DOM is a huge plus. We use prototype.js as our 'base', but have built-up a substantial support library around it. We built our own event delegation system to handle mass assignment of unobtrusive event observers. We modularize our javascript using client-side controllers. We avoid "render :update" almost completely and thereby keep display logic neatly separated. We made an rhtml to JS template translator. We even built a homegrown JavaScript library with a pre-processor! (think Sass, but for javascript)

We are big on standards compliance, within reasonable, practical limits. We target IE6+, Firefox, Opera and Safari (A-grade browser list). We use Sass for CSS because it's neat (no Haml though). Usable and accessible design is paramount because we understand the importance of the user experience, besides aesthetics. You should at the very least have skimmed through some web UI books and/or blogs. Our visual design is mostly finalized now, but having a good eye for tasteful composition and user interaction is always good. Knowing your way around CSS, especially positioning and all the popular quirks and hack-arounds is of course a plus as well.

Our production servers run Gentoo Linux and we like virtual machines. We use capistrano for deploying (although not terribly happy with it and we are looking at alternatives). RSpec for unit tests (probably not as much as we should, so if you happen to be a TDD/BDD guru we'd love to hear from you.) The main 'source trunk' is in an SVN repository, but we are looking into Git (some of us already use git via git-svn). We use Trac for tickets / organization and we hate it (but not quite enough to dispose it).

Some other skills / knowledge we are interested in:
(none of them required, but nice to have)

* Any project management and planning experience
* Social networks, collaborative filtering, reputation/recomandation systems
* Folksonomy, tagging, latent semantic indexing in document, topic clustering
* Bayesian text classification
* Data mining
* Microformats, Web API deisgn
* C++ and desktop GUI programming (for a related side-project, Windows first, Mac/Linux second)
* Flash Actionscript

If interested, please email your resume and portfolio to jobs at isohunt.com.

See above. Required skills depend on area of expertise and multiple positions are available. The more you fill the listed skills the merrier.

Among the list above, Ruby/Rails, JS, and Flash are most important.