Back-End Rails Engineer at the largest Rails site on the Web
Type: Permanent
Benefits: Flexible hours, Laptop / computer, Equity share, Health care
About Scribd:
Scribd is a San Francisco startup backed by top investors including Redpoint Ventures, the Kinsey Hills Group, Y Combinator and a handful of Silicon Valley's most prestigious angel investors. We are changing the way people share documents online. Since Scribd launched in March 2007, it has become one of the top 500 websites on the Internet, receiving over 20 million monthly visitors.
Scribd created iPaper, the first document format built for the web. Like YouTube's player did for video formats, iPaper standardizes all document formats into one viewer that can be seamlessly integrated into webpages. Through Scribd.com, iPaper and the Scribd platform, Scribd is changing the say people view, publish and monetize documents. Through our vast library of content and our unique document display technology, we hope to unlock the information in the world's documents and make it readily accessible to everyone!
We are located in the heart of downtown San Francisco, close to CalTrain, BART and MUNI. Our small team is passionate, talented, motivated and fun. You'll often find us holding group brainstorming sessions, eating lunch and dinner as a team, playing winner-take-all ping-pong games and celebrating our successes along the way. We offer competitive salaries, benefits, generous equity stakes and free food from local restaurants.
The job:
According to the Rails 100 list of the the most trafficked rails websites, Scribd is the largest rails website in the world: http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Alexa+Rankings.
You've read about the challenges of scaling rails, and doing it successfully requires a lot of infrastructure behind the scenes. Some of the back-end components we’ve written are: our own search engine library to search the largest text corpus on the internet; a fuzzy text-matching system that can identify similar blocks of text; an API that’s depended on by thousands of businesses; and a document conversion system that runs on a dynamically scalable grid of over 1,000 Amazon EC2 nodes. As a back-end engineer at Scribd, you’ll build our next generation algorithms and infrastructure to keep Scribd scaling with our traffic and expanding our capabilities.
The ideal profile:
We are looking for someone with a strong engineering background who enjoys solving hard computer science problems and writing high-quality implementations. You’ll be programming mostly in Ruby on Rails, so experience with Ruby would be ideal. Experience with scalable web services, web API’s, and the overall internet ecosystem is important.
Responsibilities:
Take ownership of some of the back-end Scribd components, such as the API and the conversion system. Improve existing infrastructure, adding features and improving performance. Add new components as determined by business needs.
Qualifications:
* Strong experience in Ruby on Rails
* Strong SQL knowledge
* C++ experience preferred
* 2+ years work experience as a software engineer
* Computer Science degree or equivalent required
* Understanding of scalability, systems engineering, and experience scaling web services
* Experience using major web service APIs such as Facebook, Flickr, Google a plus
* Experience with Amazon Web Services a plus
This position reports to the CTO.
Further Information
Quote Ref: http://www.scribd.com/static/jobs
Location
United States, San Francisco, CA
This role requires onsite work
Salary and Terms
Pay: We offer competitive salaries, benefits and generous equity stakes.
Hours: Full Time
Length of employment:
