Velluto is looking to hire a full-time Lead Ruby/Rails Developer to take over the primary development lead responsibility for our product Link Emperor (http://www.linkemperor.com/) as well as Rails development responsibilities on our other products (both existing and in development).
This is a full-time, work-from-home, choose-your-own-hours position.
[NO RECRUITERS, NO PHONE CALLS, PLEASE.]
Link Emperor’s Story
Velluto is a bootstrapped, profitable company founded in 2011. Our main product, Link Emperor, is subscription-based software-as-a-service product for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Our software is used by hundreds of SEO agencies, internal SEO departments, individual online marketers and more. We do keyword/niche research, rank checking, on-page optimization, and more. Additionally, our software serves as a conduit for our customers to purchase the link building service! s of other SEO firms (our vendor partners).
Our software has been available on the market for about 13 months. Even though we’re new, we’re making real waves in the SEO community. The reason is simple – Link Emperor actually works for SEO.
Go ahead and check out the sales materials at http://www.linkemperor.com/. Admittedly, the sales materials are meant to sell to marketers, not to computer scientists. But we do lots of relaly realy cool stuff with data. More on that later.
Our customers consistently tell us that our methods do improve their rankings, traffic, and bottom line revenues. We strongly believe that our future depends on our ability to continue to generate great results for our customers. And everything we do is 100% automated.
We're a small company (you'll be the 7th person on the team when you join) but we're at an inflection point where we're trying to grow i! nto a more robust team.
Here's where! you come in.
Up until now, Kevin, the founder of the company has been the lead engineer on all of our applications. We are now looking to build out an engineering team so that we may develop and improve our products more quickly. The first step of our search is to find an engineering lead for each of our major products to take an ownership role of the development side (but not the marketing/bizdev) side of the product.
You'll be responsible for:
- Shaping (with management) the direction of the product -- determining which features to include, what to release when, etc.
- Becoming familiar with customer feedback
- Implementation and testing (i.e. actually getting your hands dirty with Ruby code)
- Performance Tuning
- Working with Customer Support to address any technical issues faced by customers
- Basically, you'll be in char! ge of taking Link Emperor (and also our other products like Penny Backlinks) to the next level.
Tell me more about Link Emperor and Penny Backlinks!
Link Emperor, our flagship product, has been around since 2011 and has hundreds of paying customers. Penny Backlinks is a separate product that offers subsets of Link Emperor's functionality at a lower price point.
We obsess over our interfaces. While the results are what keep a customer, the beauty and simplicity of the interface are what get them hooked in the first place.
We’re built on Rails 3, and use DataMapper, Resque, Haml, Sass, jQuery, Memcached, and Git. We host everything on an internally managed server stack on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. We also have some very important backend apps written in C, a marketing website powered by Wordpress, and client libraries for our API in a number of languages! .
We use Mac OS and vim for development, but you’re f! ree to use whatever you’d like. We run Linux (Ubuntu) on our servers.
We have Continuous Integration, a full staging environment, and take testing seriously. Our eventual goal is 100% test coverage, however we are not there yet. So we're looking for people who can be comfortable in an environment with an "evolving" test suite. Our goal is to have 100% test coverage by the end of the year.
What's Next?
A lot of the work we do is heavily related to SEO. We aren’t trying to “reverse engineer the Google algorithm,” per se, but we do spend a lot of time figuring out what will help our clients get the rankings that they want.
To get a better feel for the specifics of what you'll get to do in this job, here are some of the things that we did on the development side recently:
- Wrote a search engine rank checker in C that is able to check! 1,000s of ranks per minute.
- Developed a web crawler in C for verifying the existence of links on various lander URLs and rapidly categorizing those links based on context, attributes, etc.
- Developed a technique for finding freely available proxy servers and then checking their availability and response times.
- Developed an “Efficiency Score” algorithm that ranks different link building providers by timeliness, correctness, and price.
- Integrated cookie-based tracking from our promotional offers, marketing website, and application to help us track our marketing efforts.
- Rewrote the entire interface to use jquery-PJAX.
- Integrated with APIs from tons of partners, including SEOmoz, Majestic SEO, SEMrush, Lindexed, TheBestSpinner, and more.
- Built custom extensions for Resque and DataMapper to support our backend processing workflow.
- Designed a dynamic pre-ca! lculation system to automatically cache all aggregate values that we di! splay in our interface so customers get their data quickly.
- Improved our API to provide our partners more flexibility with how they integrate to our systems.
What makes this opportunity unique?
A really awesome team. The co-founder of the company is also the development lead and comes from a strong programming background. Kevin graduated Cum Laude in Computer Science from Harvard and been using Rails since version 1.0. We are always skeptical of tech companies that don’t have tech founders, and we would never ask you to join unless we knew that you would enjoy working with us.
Work from home. There’s nothing we hate more than commuting. So, we don’t have an office and would definitely like to avoid having one for as long as possible. If you have a family at home, move between locations, or even live! abroad, this is a great opportunity to do all your work from home and stop wasting all that time on commuting. It’s like getting 2 free hours added back to your day.
Choose your own hours. As long as you’re available to work at least 5 days a week and a total of 40 hours during the week, you can shuffle around your work schedule as you see fit. Work 2 hours, then run and take the kids to lunch, come back and work another 3 hours, and then put in another 3 hours before bed. We work highly variable hours so we’ll be able to sync up no matter when you work.
Free travel. Because we’re a distributed team that all work from home, we go out of our way bring the team together in person a couple times a year. We speak at a number of SEO-related industry conferences (think PubCon, AdTech, Affiliate Summit, etc.) and at various Internet Marketing meetups, summits, and training ! sessions. When it makes sense, and when we can, we’d like t! o bring you along.
We use these as an opportunity to get the team together to relax, work, brainstorm, and party with our customers and each other. We’ll also ask you to be part of our booth staff at some of the various conferences where we exhibit.
We’ll also bring the whole programming team to RailsConf and maybe another Ruby conference every year. Furthermore, we’ll cover your expenses for any Ruby-related conference where you can get a speaking gig.
Some of these trips will be in conjunction with the programming and marketing teams from our other companies, so you’ll get to meet the “extended family” as well.
Stability. Link Emperor is bootstrapped, profitable, adequately capitalized, and debt-free. We are committed to continuously improving our customer experience and believe that the product will never be “finished.” By the end of November, we exp! ect to have a full time staff of 4-5 people, including the two founders, which is pretty good for a bootstrapped company that’s only been around for about 3 months.
Mentorship and training. Co-founders Kevin and Bobby also run a popular Business and Marketing podcast called Gangster Profit (www.gangsterprofit.com). Working for us means you can be a part of how we make business decisions and formulate strategy. We also promise to take all of your input seriously, meaning you’ll have a real ability to shape the future of the business. And you’ll be one of the lead developers, which means you’ll get to shape the product too.
Also, we’re pretty well connected in the Internet Marketing community, so you’ll get to meet some pretty big names in Internet Marketing just by hanging out with us.
And of course, you’ll learn a ton about SEO! While we’d like to keep you forever i! f you’re good, if you do part ways from us, you’ll be able ! to take what you’ve learned about SEO to your next gig. (And trust us, mastering SEO was the single biggest business move we ever made.)
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