This is a permanent role based in Silicon Valley. No corp-to-corp please. If for some reason this role does not match your skills, please refer someone qualified as we do offer referral fees for those that consequently get hired.
Company:
Our client is a leader building state of the art unified software solutions for social, talent management, learning and collaboration within the enterprise. They have successfully deployed their product into the Global 2000, including many of the largest global companies. People will have the opportunity to work with some the best known companies in the world, many of which have standardized on our client*s platform. They have been experiencing growth every year and are financially sound. Recently, key executives from competitor companies have been joining our client because of their innovation and vision.
They are continuing their tradition of investing in innovation and being a thought leader in their market space. The company is on a mission to move the needle on innovation, quality and maintainability. When the company started, they successfully defined a market that didn*t exist. Now they are embarking on a new vision to redefine and revolutionize the market place again by creating people centric processes that combine the formal processes from enterprise applications and the informal processes of social networks via an on-premise and an OnDemand (SaaS) model. They are looking at creating exceptional business value from new models of peer to peer interactions and networked, community based collaborations. It is about people productivity in a Web 2.0 world, taking advantage of the informal interactions that drive productivity, learning and innovation * user generated content; collective intelligence; and the social network that brings it all together.
The ideal person to fit in their culture is someone that has worked at a large company and really learned best of class practices; and then went to a start up and knows what it is like to deliver quality products quickly using Agile methodologies. They are very entrepreneurial and are looking for people that can think out of the box and be willing to take initiative.
Position:
This person will be responsible for the platform layer of their product, reporting to the Sr Dir, Platform Engineering. There will be both architecture work and implementation for this person. Our client divides their platform group into two groups * platform and foundation (which sits on top of the platform). The platform layer is the base infrastructure on which they build their apps. It handles the frameworks, web services, connections, how security works, how to access the database, how to support multiple databases (Oracle, SQL Server and DB2) and web servers (Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss), basically all the core plumbing. The foundation layer is where all the core abstractions and modeling is done; essentially all the business rules and logic.
In this role, from a technical perspective, this person needs to have strong architecture skills, J2EE, Java, design patterns, EJB, JSP, Hibernate, Web Services, HTTP, XML, SQL, Oracle/DB2/SQL Server, multithreading, clustering, high availability, back end server, developed applications in highly scalable environments, and developing software using Agile methodologies.
Beyond the fundamental technical skills, a person needs to have a background in
1. Machine Learning
2. Search Technologies (either developed search engines or extended Lucene/Solr)
3. Distributed system fundamentals (someone that has built a transaction manager, multithreading, concurrency, JMS, MQ Series, etc)
They are looking at moving from a Business based platform to an Information based platform. The Business Platform will continue to handle the basics like billing, class registration, etc. The Information Platform will really take advantage of the new technologies and ways of gathering/sharing/collaborating with information.
For example, a typical use case scenario for the Information Platform might be an oil services company is going to be doing some drilling and they need to assemble a team of the right people from within the enterprise. If the drilling is going to take place at certain depth, with certain types of rocks, under a certain pressure, who are the best people in the enterprise for that role? These are problems that don*t have any easy answers and require an ability to innovate and invent. The goal is that they can gather information about people within their system, but also outside the system through other ERP packages, wikis, blogs, papers, etc
To be successful in this role, a person must:
1. Deeply understand technology * really understand what goes on under the covers
2. Have an intimate knowledge of the code base they have been working on. The person in this role will be writing a lot of code
3. Have the ability to innovate and invent.
