Job opening - CouchSurfing International: Back End Engineer for CouchSurfing

Location: San Francisco
URL: http://couchsurfing.org

CouchSurfing is an international network that connects travelers with locals in over 230 countries around the world. Since 2004, members have been using our system to come together for cultural exchange, friendship, and learning experiences. Today, almost four million people who might otherwise never meet are able to share hospitality and cultural understanding all over the world.

Our mission as an organization is to create inspiring experiences: cross-cultural encounters that are fun, engaging, and illuminating. These experiences take many forms. CouchSurfing's initial focus was on hosting and 'surfing' (staying with a local as a guest in their home). Alongside these core experiences, we now also facilitate a growing array of activities and events.

We have a new office in San Francisco and are looking for talented inspiring new colleagues to help out in this incredible! mission! Look at our website for more information: CouchSurfingJobs.com

 

Currently we are looking for a BACK-END ENGINEER

 

Do you get excited by building fantastically robust, reliable, scalable technology that powers mission-critical websites? Do you scoff at anything less than tens of millions of rows in your database? When you’re faced with a problem, is “automate it out of existence” your first response? Can you solve transaction deadlocks in your sleep?

If so, you might just be what we’re looking for at CouchSurfing. Our site is built by a crack team of amazing engineers that add new functionality to it on a daily basis, and we’re looking for someone with the same passion for back-end scalability and performance as some of our JavaScript whizz! es have for UI. You’ll have full reign over every system, fr! om databases and memcache instances up through the entire application stack to the UI itself, with the charter to make CouchSurfing ever more scalable, reliable, robust, and better performing than ever.

 

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for folks who have at least a few years’ experience writing code that runs in real-world scenarios â€" powering websites, core infrastructure, mission-critical systems and the like. We’re looking for strong engineers, so whether you’ve written in Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Java, .NET or the like is less important to us than whether you’re a truly world-class engineer. We’re also looking for folks for whom teamwork is the norm, not the exception; we communicate constantly and are a tightly-bonded team, and we’d love for you to be part of that, too.

Particular skills that we’re interested in:

• Total comfort in a Unix/Linux environment;
• Web tools and techniques, from HTTP to proxies to caching and so forth;
• Relational databases (particular flavor isn’t important, although MySQL is a bonus);
• Email infrastructure (sending millions of messages per day when required);
• Dynamic programming languages (like Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.).

What will you do?

We believe in giving engineers the power to accomplish anything and everything they can imagine. As a result, the entirety of CouchSurfing will be your domain; as a member of a team of amazing engineers, you’ll be able to help determine infrastructure, architecture, storage and processing of every component of the site. We’ll ask you for input on probl! ems large and small, listen to your earned expertise, and give you full! authority to go solve problems to the best of your ability.

Specific things you just might get to attack:

• Scaling our site to thousands of Web requests per second;
• Expanding our database storage â€" via MySQL and/or new tools you may come up with â€" to handle the huge increase in volume required;
• Figuring out how to get email into the hands of millions of members, when they want it, while avoiding spam traps and other pitfalls;
• Keeping our servers responding to requests in fractions of a second, optimizing throughput and latency at the same time;
• Helping our engineers keep our site reliable and robust for our millions of users 

Minimum Required Experience & Education

• Bachelor's Degree in Science strongly preferred
• 2+ years experience as ! a Back End Engineer

This is a full-time position in San Francisco, CA.

To apply: Please apply via our Jobs Page at CouchSurfingJobs.com

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