Smarkets Blog

Continuing our hiring binge, we’re also looking for engineers experienced with the rest of the stack.

A bit about Smarkets

Smarkets is one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Tech Startups to watch in Europe, was shortlisted for the Startups Awards, and is heavily driven by user-focused design and a focus on technology and engineering as a first class discipline. We use agile product development techniques and release changes frequently.

We are also heavily invested in world-class technical talent from such pedigree as Wolverine Trading, Last.fm, and Yahoo!; and are looking to foster that reputation within the community and investors.

A bit about the job and working environment

The part of our stack which runs behind the website is one of the few websites that uses Erlang as a primary language, and is supported by other well-known Erlang projects such as RabbitMQ and CouchDB.

The non-Erlang pieces of our stack are entirely written in Python, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST.

Key Responsibilities

• Build new products and services that augment our exchange offering;
• Improve existing market exchange infrastructure and services;
• Program primarily using Python and Erlang; and
• Work in a start up environment where getting things done is crucial.

Requirements

• Computer Science (or related technical field) degree or equivalent professional experience;
• The ability to learn quickly with enthusiasm;
• The ability to work independently and lead design/architecture of new features;
• Knowledge of transaction processing and relational database design; and
• Prior experience delivering solid web-related products in a GNU/Linux environment.

Bonus points

• Functional programming experience;
• Experience with web technologies and methodologies like web servers, REST, and protocol buffers;
• Using Git in a multi-developer environment.

Other information about the job

• This is a full time, on site job;
• The job is based in Clerkenwell, London, United Kingdom.

If you’re looking for a flexible, agile team to work with; want to work somewhere free of big corporate politics; would like a cool project to work on; and fit the above criteria we’d love to hear from you! Please provide a CV and some examples of your recent or relevant work.

We’re happy to announce that we’re looking for an experienced front end web developer for a full time position with an immediate start! Here’s some useful information about our platform:

Our front end application is a collection of Django apps built on an exclusively Python API client (to a RESTful Erlang API), and we’re looking for someone to build out user-facing features. We’ve also recently added a search application that’s powered by Flask.

A typical candidate:

• Hand-written, valid (when required) (X)HTML (although Smarkets values HTML 4.01 Strict, and we’d expect a candidate to be able to explain the difference between XHTML and HTML in practical terms);
• Solid knowledge of Javascript, above and beyond frameworks, but also experience with the benefits of Javascript frameworks, including jQuery and YUI;
• Experience writing cross-browser CSS;
• Demonstrated understanding and experience of how the above things can affect accessibility and performance;
• Experience with Django, Pylons, TurboGears or any other modern Python-based web frameworks. We use Django at Smarkets, so bonus points for that;
• A good cultural fit for a small team that works under the pressure, short deadlines, and high workload start ups are legendary for (we drink a lot of coffee); and
• A proven history of getting the job done on high quality websites.

An ideal candidate:

• Knows your way around Linux;
• Solid Python experience, beyond just Django or Pylons;
• Using Git in a multi-developer environment.

About the job

• This is a full time, on site job;
• The job is based in Clerkenwell, London, United Kingdom.

If you’re looking for a flexible, agile team to work with; want to work somewhere free of big corporate politics; would like a cool project to work on; and fit the above criteria we’d love to hear from you! Please provide a CV and some examples of your recent or relevant work.