If you are looking for a team of smart, engaged, passionate people who are changing the world read on…
The Company:
Our web app (www.inventables.com) helps companies you’ve heard of like Louis Vuttion, New Balance, and Abbott Labs make better products for consumers. It does this by connecting them to vendors that have listed their materials on our website like squishy magnets, tension sensing rope, and stainless steel yarn. For example, a product developer at a shoe company might use a search engine or our homepage to search for something they need for a new shoe design like “colorful metal mesh”. The results they get would look like this, this, and if they click our link they land here. They can then read about the material and make an inquiry to the vendor if they are interested. The vendor gets an alert email, can read about the person, their company, the stage of their project, and a description of the need and can choose to purchase the sales lead or pass.
We exist to make sourcing and selling materials and technologies easier than the status quo. Our challenge is to grow the number of product profiles on our site while designing the software that runs the website in a way where it gets “smarter” the more it is used. This will help vendors get qualified sales leads worth their time and product developers find the right vendors faster than the way they do it now.
The Team:
We believe the best software is written by intentionally small teams that know how to make the impossible possible. We use agile software development techniques to relentlessly focus our coding efforts on solving our business goals. We pair program, and we follow the red-green-refactor loop relentlessly. We deliver early and often. We believe that these practices lead to higher code quality. The team includes our Lead Developer, who is an agilist with a passion for building products that people love to use and a UI Designer, with a passion for usability.
You:
You’ll be joining our small team, so we’re looking for someone that wants to work in a VC funded startup that was formerly bootstrapped. You have a passion for web development, are self-motivated, and enjoy working in a user-focused, highly intelligent, entrepreneurial environment. We look for aptitude not experience but you probably have experience working with dynamic languages, are ruthless about testing & refactoring, and bring superior skills in the following areas:
- Ruby, Rails
- Object-oriented programming
- BDD/TDD, Agile practices
- Pair programming
- Javascript, CSS, AJAX
- Linux server/stack administration (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc)
What you get:
The chance to build a technical team
The chance to have a big impact on building a successful startup
Competitive salary based on experience
Health Insurance at no additional cost to you (coverage for spouse/family available at an additional cost)
Options Program
Bonus Program (paid out monthly)
401k program with 4% contribution match
Exploration budget – to keep you creative
Free Point Friday (Work on what YOU think is important)
Tell us the tools you need Mac or PC & software
Fuel: Breakfast, snacks, drinks
Small workout room to let off steam or remove that beer belly
Massages – yes we have a massage chair
Young fast-paced work environment
Nintendo Wii – to chill out sometimes
Our Values:
Honesty and integrity – We are honest with each other, vendors, customers, and honest with ourselves. We acknowledge things as they are, not as we wish them to be.
A commitment to rational thinking – Decisions are based on logic and reason instead of emotions or intuition.
Responsibility – We take ownership over the outcome. We share the entrepreneurial spirit and play to win.
Excellence – As individuals we have higher expectations for ourselves than Inventables has for us. We are committed to personal excellence and self improvement
Curiosity – We are curious people that are always learning about new things and investigating new areas: everything from buying novel products at the grocery store to exploring new information technology.
How to Apply:
This is an in-house position, so please only apply if you are in the Chicago area or willing to relocate. To apply the first step is to show us how awesome you are with a project.
Have you ever played mastermind? It’s a classic board game involving two players: the code-maker and the code-breaker. You can google it or read about it in the RSpec book for more background information. We’ve placed a ruby project on github (URL below) that models the game of mastermind. Your challenge is to pull this project down and make all the cucumber scenarios pass for the “code-breaker submits guess” feature by implementing Game#guess.
When you are finished, submit a tarball of your tree, including your name (e.g. lastname-firstname-challenge.tar.gz) to dev-challenge@inventables.com.
Project URL: git://github.com/inventables/chirb-mastermind.git
Attention recruiters: Inventables,Inc. does not accept candidates through recruiting agencies. Please do not call our office or forward resumes to our jobs alias or to Inventables, Inc. Inventables, Inc. is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.