Verba Jobs on Startuply

Half-Time-Ish Rails Developer in San Francisco

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:14:19 GMT

File this in the somewhat unorthodox job postings folder...I have a lawyer friend who works 25-30 hours a week and spends the rest of his time rock climbing, and we were talking about how much he loves it the other day. So that got me thinking about what my ideal job situation would be, and it's something like work 3 days a week, have $50-60k/yr and healthcare that I can count on, but still have plenty of time to work on my own projects and go cycling. :)

Unfortunately I can't do that right now (caught the startup founder bug) but we have a couple of developers who do this for us and I thought I'd see if anyone else is interested in this kind of gig.

Advantages for you:
- you get 2 extra weekend days for fun and profit
- if some weeks you don't have lots to do and want to work more, and other weeks you have lots to do and want to work less, we can be flexible
- we're profitable and growing! so if you decide "wow I really love Verba and want to spend every waking moment there" we can probably make that dream come true

Advantages for us:
- you have more time to learn new things, meet new people and generally be a friendlier, happier, more knowledgeable person in our workplace
- we can hire faster with less anxiety (instead of the "*gulp* i just committed $100k/yr" feeling, we have the "*smaller gulp* i just committed $50k/yr" feeling :)
- you get to be a part of what we're doing, we get to hear about all the cool stuff you're doing, and that can only lead to good things for both of us

Anyway, I've included our spiel and "what we're looking for" summary below. I also filled out the ominously-titled "responsibilities" section.

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SPIEL
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The college textbook market is currently being disrupted. Verba helps college bookstores transform themselves so that they a) understand and embrace the power of the nets, b) become agents of change in the textbook industry instead of agents of reaction and c) still make a healthy profit.

We're an 8-person B2B company working with just north of 175 colleges and universities, and we're looking for people familiar with Ruby, Rails, MySQL and JS who can help us grow faster. We (thankfully) don't have too many scaling problems, but we have a ton of opportunities (product and partner-based) that we could move on much faster with a few more hands on deck. The ideal person has strong Rails knowledge, a good head for architecture and knows enough JS to help out on front-end.

Be sure to check out our website (http://www.verbasoftware.com) so you can read all about our current products and hear people say nice things about us.

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Rails Engineer/Developer in San Francisco

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:00:49 GMT

Verba works with colleges, universities, and campus stores to lower the price of textbooks for students while making sure that college bookstores continue to prosper.

We're 3 years old and 100 colleges strong, and we're looking for a Rails developer who can help us continue to improve our products. It's a unique job since each of our products is a little bit different in terms of audience: one is a consumer-facing e-commerce application, another is a data analytics platform for college bookstores and the last is more enterprise-y workflow management.

You'll be working with a hands-on founding team (I -- CTO Mike -- do most of the back-end and sysadmin work, our COO Jared does design, front-end and customer support, and our CEO Ryan runs sales and strategy) who've developed a lot of traction in the textbook/bookstore industry. We've very profitable, have great clients and love what we do. We're excited to bring someone onboard who can help us build and deploy new features and products faster than we're able to right now (having lots of clients tends to take up a lot of time :p

The majority of what we do, we do in Rails. Since we work with data and visualization, though, we also have a large Javascript code base and we use a few different data stores/sources depending on function (MySQL, CouchDB, various flat files and APIs). And of course we have a "cloud" server deployment, most of which is fully automated. You're free to apply your skills to help out on some of these ancillary parts of our infrastructure.

You can check out our product descriptions on our website prior to applying to get a better idea of what you're getting into: http://www.verbasoftware.com/products

What You'll Do:

+ Work with CTO Mike to plan and organize development and rollout of projects.

+ Develop, implement and own projects. To give a rough idea, projects tend to break down by time like this:

++ 30% - standard Rails MVC work
+++ Recent example: giving our clients an interface so they don't have to bother us to make changes to the third-party retailers they include in our comparison shopping app
+++ Required: building out preference system with fallbacks, error-checking user input (did they forget to provide a required URL or access code?) and ensuring that our analytics platform remained operational after the changes

++ 20% - building and consuming APIs (we have to pass a bunch of data back and forth with partners)

++ 20% - fun with big data
+++ We track online pricing for around 100,000 textbooks, have oodles of historical textbook selection data and routinely index bookstore textbook catalogs several megabytes in size...per term. The majority of our business comes from distilling all this information into friendly, bite-sized pieces, so a certain amount of data diving ends up being involved :)

++ 30% - putting out fires
+++ Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not, but it's always interesting. Partners change APIs unannounced, clients absolutely need their gnarly, semi-comma-delimited, heretofore-unimaginable flat file formats parsed STAT, and about a million other surprises. Our clients are very grateful when we can work magic for them, and we've gained a ton of experience chasing down bugs and pulling together new features that touch on so many different parts of our code base, infrastructure and skills.

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Rails Developer/Engineer at Textbooks Startup in San Francisco

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:58:57 GMT

Verba works with colleges, universities, and campus stores to lower the price of textbooks for students while making sure that college bookstores continue to prosper.

We're 4 years old and 225 colleges strong, and we're looking for a Rails developer who can help us continue to improve our products. We do some e-commerce, some data analytics and some workflow management. Check out our website: http://www.verbasoftware.com/products

You'll be working with a hands-on team of 9 who've developed a lot of traction in the textbook/bookstore industry. We've profitable, have great clients and love what we do. We're excited to bring someone onboard who can help us build and deploy new features and products faster than we're able to right now.

We're mainly Rails on the backend. Since we work with data and visualization, though, we also have a large Javascript/Coffeescript code base and we use a few different data stores/sources depending on function (MySQL, DynamoDB, various flat files and APIs). We like rspec and use Konacha for JS testing.

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WHAT YOU'LL DO
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We're looking for a generalist. Someone who's as comfortable throwing together a prototype of a new feature in Rails and Coffeescript as refactoring existing code as tracking down a crazy bug. We tend to have a pretty "you do what you like" culture and are good about both trying new things and properly caring for and feeding the older stuff that just works (tm).

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