Feb 3, 2012

Stormpulse is Hiring

After tens of thousands of hours of product and customer development, Stormpulse is expanding to rapidly accelerate in 2012.  We’re looking for engineers to join our Austin-based team.

What We Do

  • We help companies manage their weather risk.  What does that mean?  We help airlines decide when to take off and land.  We help shipping companies predict delays.  We help insurance companies forecast losses.  We help manufacturers decide when to request additional parts ahead of a storm.  We help create situational awareness for the White House bunker.
  • We serve 6.5 million unique visitors per year.  
Our Philosophy

Stormpulse has designed and introduced a very simple solution in the very complex problem space of weather risk management.  As our product matures, we will continue to add power by taming complexity.  

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” —Regis McKenna
“Simplicity isn’t just a visual style.  It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter.  It involves digging through the depth of the complexity.  To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.  For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex.  The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured.  You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” —Jony Ive

Who We’re Looking For

BACK-END ENGINEER
  • You are a data geek. You get excited by the idea of liberating arcanely formatted data feeds by extracting, transforming, and integrating them into our custom models of the weather. You know that high-quality data models are the bedrock of high-quality systems.  As Robert Pike has written, “Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.”
  • You know SQL really well.  Not just from the perspective of an ORM that does all the work for you. You know how to create data structures that scale. You believe that with the right indexes nearly every query can be written in such a way that it runs in a few milliseconds. You have worked with MySQL and perhaps PostgreSQL/PostGIS (geospatial extension). Experience with GIS is a major plus. We use some NoSQL stuff for some of the larger datasets.
  • You know your way around linux—Microsoft-ies need not apply.  You may not be a total sysadmin, but you relish the opportunity to manage a complex scalable backend infrastructure that spans machine boundaries.
  • You can write robust, performant, and reliable software, preferably in Python.
  • While your role is primarily in architecting and building the backend systems that power (feed data to) our superior user interface to the world of weather, we are at heart an information design company, so a sense of design and interest in visualization is a major plus.
  • You may or may not already be interested in weather. In either case, the world we live in is a data geek’s paradise. After encryption, weather data is the second largest consumer of supercomputing time. The opportunities in this domain for creating value through the combination of weather and related data sets are vast. Big data is term bandied about these days, but weather is very big data indeed.
  • You understand that simplicity on the surface is the result of tamed complexity below.  
FRONT-END ENGINEER
  • You believe the best things are created through art and science.
  • We are at heart an information design company, so a sense of design and interest in visualization is a must. You should enjoy maps. A lot. 
  • We’d be shocked if you don’t know of Tufte. 
  • You understand value creation.  As a corollary, you get excited about understanding a problem space deeply, even when it requires schlepping through things that are boring at first glance.  
  • You are familiar with a popular MVC framework, but more importantly, you’ve built some non-trivial systems in Real World, and you realize that the edge cases here are a far cry from Hello World. 
  • We tend to take a modular approach as opposed to the kitchen sink perspective. On the server side, we run Python and use pylons (a minimalistic modular web framework). 
  • Our models on the server side are accessed via SQL Alchemy, which is a really powerful database toolkit for python.
  • Javascript-wise, so far we’ve just been using jQuery on the client, but you might end up changing that.  You understand that Node.js is not the solution for everything.
  • You know your way around linux or have at least had the curiosity to bust out the command-line on that Mac of yours. You probably don’t run Windows on your machine. You probably do run OS X. You might have another machine sitting around that has linux on it. 
  • You might like weather, or you might not. In either case, our world is an information designer’s paradise. The opportunities in this domain for creating value through intelligent designs that tell a story about weather phenomena and its effect on the people and assets of large organizations (while all the while being data-driven) are practically limitless. 
  • We’ve got plenty of big plans from a product perspective. The limiting reagent will be finding people like you that grok our philosophy to the extent that we can trust you to take on projects of larger and larger scope with less and less supervision. 
  • If we had bumper stickers on our cars, they might read “We’d rather be designing (something)”. What would yours say?
What You Get

  • A ground-level view inside a growing startup that has bootstrapped its way from nothing in a space that’s ripe for disruption.
  • Salary.
  • Equity in a startup that delivers real value to real customers willing to pay for a solution to their problems.
Interested?  Email us: founders-at-stormpulse-dot-com.

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