Due to unprecedented growth, akosma software is hiring.
Here’s what we offer:
- A full-time position as a partner software developer (for the moment, just one, but stay tuned). Your primary task will be to create and maintain software products, either our own or our clients’.
- But beware: coding is only part of the job: you are also going to write documentation, evaluate projects, manage schedules, update websites, train other people, answer e-mail, update Twitter accounts, perform a few sysadmin tasks, and actively create your own work environment.
- You are also going to blog and to publish open source projects. A lot. Your skills will be seen, published, under your own name.
- Telecommuting: work at home if you want. No fixed work hours. As long as the work is done, we don’t mind. Skype, Redmine and iChat are your allies.
- A workplace with a Joel Test of 10 (we still don’t have a hallway to do usability testing, and you will be the first “new candidate” 🙂
- A good salary (by Swiss standards, which tend to be pretty good compared to other countries)
- All the nice things of a small company (and some drawbacks too, why deny it, that’s how life is.)
You have the following characteristics and skills:
- Excellent, brilliant iPhone development skills: you breath Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder, and everything else bundled in the SDK. You downloaded the first iPhone SDK two years ago and immediately fell in love with it. You can write a Twitter client in half a day of work.
- At least two (2) applications published on the App Store (in any country), even if under the name of a previous client (in this case the reference must be verifiable).
- Strong online presence: an interesting blog, a popular Twitter account, a nice StackOverflow profile, an awesome Github or bitbucket account with some cool projects, other contributions to open source, all are good.
- Excellent knowledge of C++ and Ruby.
- You know how to use a basic image editor like Pixelmator, Acorn or even Photoshop. You know that PNG rocks. You have read the Mobile HIG. You bought a developer sketchbook and you keep it with you at all times.
- Good knowledge of web development, that means that you’ve used one or many of the following: Rails, jQuery, Prototype, PHP, JavaScript, Cappuccino, Sproutcore, WebObjects, or other similar libraries, technologies, and buzzwords.
- Self driven, impulsive, opinionated and creative. You are a doer, an actor, and it shows. People either love or hate you.
- You use Git or Mercurial every day. And you always write a meaningful message when you commit.
- Whatever your native language is, you have excellent English skills, written and spoken. Particularly, you know the difference between “it’s” and “its”.
- Unit testing (well, quality management in general) is a reflex, not an afterthought.
- You feel more confortable and work faster using a command line. You donwload files with curl, you connect to your home server with ssh and you edit your blog using vim. Please include your .tcshrc, .bashrc and .vimrc files together with your CV.
- Strong Mac OS X skills. You prefer SubEthaEdit, TextMate or Smultron when you don’t use vim (see previous point).
- Minimum age: 30 years old, with a proven minimum of 5 years of software engineering experience in general (not only iPhone, of course). We care more about practical experience than university degrees, but hey, if you have one, even better!
Bonuses (not required but a good way to score more points):
- You are located in Switzerland. Yup, depending on your skills, we could work out a solution for you even if you live abroad.
- Experience in development of software for “jailbroken” iPhones (of course, if you have apps published in Cydia, that’s a bonus++).
- Experience in the development of iPhone apps using other frameworks than Apple’s own SDK.
- Experience in the development of Android, BlackBerry, or other (ir)relevant mobile platforms.
- OpenGL, audio, signal treatment, any kind of multimedia programming or even graphic design skills.
- You write letters to your beloved ones in LaTeX.
- You are a musician, a painter, a designer, an artist. Many artists are also great software developers.
- Your blog uses a weird combination of cutting-edge CSS3 selectors, obscure page generators and some innovative JavaScript libraries.
- You own a Das Keyboard. Preferably the one without labels on the keys.
- You have read Getting Real and It’s Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be and tried desperately to apply that knowledge in a previous workplace with abysmal Joel Test scores. You didn’t succeed and that’s why this blog post sounds interesting.
- You have experience in other SCM systems, proprietary or not, like Subversion, Bazaar or even CVS. SourceSafe does not add points: actually it substracts, so you’d better not mention it.
- You know other not-so-common programming languages, like Haskell, Erlang, Brainfuck, Lisp or Prolog. Java has the same effect as SourceSafe – see previous point (unless you have done Android programming, in which case you are forgiven, of course).
- A Bachelor, a minor, a major, postgraduate, Master’s or PhD degree in anything else but computer science. In other words, show us that you have a life and that technology is just another one of your passions.
- Your new year resolutions for 2010 include reading at least 6 technical books and learning a new programming language.
- You are convinced that compilers are just a poor man’s testing suite.
- You speak or write other “human” languages, like Chinese, Arabic, Quechua or Swahili (but please, only contact us in English.)
- You shake your head in dismay while reading this posting and the sheer amount of bad geek jokes.
- Finally, you know Linux and Windows pretty well. As a developer, that is, not only as a user. C++, .NET, Python, all are welcome in this sense. But not Visual Basic, in any of its forms.
Are you interested? Then get in touch presenting yourself (in English please), and explaining in detail why you think you are the best candidate we have ever met and how lucky we are. Don’t forget to add the link to your LinkedIn account or your CV (PDF, Pages, Word, OpenOffice, LaTeX or plain text accepted).
By the way, the presentation letter is very important. Don’t skip that part. We won’t pay as much attention without a good one. We’ll get back to you anyway, even if your skills aren’t what we are looking for; we hate those companies who ask for workforce, receive candidacies and never answer them back to say “no thanks”, so we don’t behave that way.