About us

UpHex (http://uphex.com) is a tiny, nascent SaaS company that helps marketing agencies monitor analytics for their clients. We're currently in the middle of a pilot with about a dozen brave customers. In total, they're sending us about 100,000 data points per day across a number of connected Twitter, Facebook, and Google Analytics accounts.

We're completely bootstrapped with a current runway of about 18 months, although we plan to seek seed funding soon. In June 2014 we also won a $50,000 grant from the state of Virginia's Commonwealth Research and Commercialization Fund. We don't yet charge our users anything during this trial phase, but we'd like to do so (very) soon.

That's where you come in.

About the role

We're looking for a full-stack engineer to help us build this platform. We're looking for someone who has a passion for software development, loves making things work well, and who thrives in a high-impact, low-ceremony startup environment.

In general, you would be responsible for:

• creating and developing additional controllers, views, styles, scripts, services, and models to support new features
• integrating with and authenticating to other third-party services
• evaluating, prototyping, and experimenting with technologies to decide if they're right for us
• helping us scale to ~10⁵ users and ~10¹⁰ observations per day
• using your technical expertise to help set the direction for the company's future
• maintaining, refining, and refactoring our codebase as needed or warranted to add value

This is a contract position. We're open to working with your availability, although we'd prefer that you work at least 2 to 3 days each week for some consistency. But otherwise, we care much more about the results you deliver than the hours you spend.

Our technology

We generally place a high premium on architectural and code simplicity, and try to minimize complexity at all levels.

We run a Padrino stack on Cloud66 and DigitalOcean. ActiveRecord 4 is used for the small number of models that interact with the database directly. The datastore is Postgresql 9.3; we also use Redis to store jobs for Resque.

The architecture is likewise fairly simple: there's one load balancer, two web servers, one process server, and one Postgresql database. Our codebase is small right now, clocking in at around 1,000 lines including all models, controllers, and services.

You can run all the tests (RSpec and Rubocop) with a single command, and you can deploy to production or any other environment with a single command.

About you

You:

• are comfortable working with a remote team
• are comfortable using tools like Google Hangout and Flowdock to collaborate with teammates
• have a GitHub, Twitter, or StackOverflow account
• enjoy one of XKCD, SMBC, Model View Culture, or PBF
• are a fan of DRY, STTCPW, and YAGNI

Your technology experience includes most or all of the following:

• expert proficiency with Padrino, Sinatra, or Rails 4
• significant experience with JS, events, and asynchronous method calls
• familiarity with Sass and CSS
• experience integrating with and authenticating to third-party services
• a preference for writing clean, simple code and questioning complexity
• experience writing and refactoring good tests with RSpec
• experience using Git

Bonus points if:

• you have worked on the team of at least one revenue-producing, production project using Padrino or Sinatra
• you've used D3.js
• you can point to public commits you've made on a project you like
• you have written an interesting technical blog post, essay, rant, etc. that you can link to
• you have worked at a startup before
• you understand and use topic/feature branches in Git

How to apply

If you think you'd be a good fit, we'd love to hear from you! To apply, send an e-mail to tech-team [email protected] that includes the following info:

• the URLs for two companies or projects that you've previously worked on, along with a short description of what you did there and when
• the URL of the most interesting thing you've read, listened to, or watched lately, along with a short description of why it's interesting to you
• the URL of a commit that you made to a public project, or a commit

Please also include at least two of:

• your GitHub or Bitbucket account URL
• your StackOverflow user profile URL
• your LinkedIn profile URL
• your Twitter handle

Please don't send a resume. We're not hiring a PDF -- we're hiring you!

We promise to be in touch within one business day. If you have any questions, we invite you to talk directly to John Feminella, our CTO. His e-mail is <his first name>@uphex.com (but use tech-team [email protected] once you're ready to apply).

We look forward to hearing from you!