benblair

Catalytic | https://catalytic.com | Chicago, IL | Fulltime ONSITE | $100K - $120+K

We're building Pushbot, a platform to help teams with their recurring business processes. Join a founding team of veteran technologists with $1B+ exits bringing user-centric design, bots, mobility and machine learning to a market dominated by user-antagonistic, top-down solutions.

We're looking for two senior-level engineers:

Lead Chatbot Engineer: lead development of our conversational interface to Pushbot. You will own the conversation engine that allows our customers to chat with Pushbot via email, Slack, HipChat, SMS, WeChat, etc.

Lead Platform Engineer: lead development of our integration platform. You will own the platform that developers (internal and external) will use to connect pushbot to other systems.

Why Catalytic:

* Recently closed a $3M seed round

* Committed pilot customers

* Solving a ubiquitous but unsexy problem in beautiful ways

* Modern stack: Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch and others

* Good docs, extensive test coverage, automated deploys :simple_smile:

* A culture that balances exciting challenging work with your personal time

Here's what to expect from our hiring process: First, I'll email you back within 48 hours. Then we'll have a 30-minute get-to-know-each-other call followed by a 30-minute technical call. Then we'll do a 60-minute remote pair coding session and finally meet the team in person.

https://angel.co/catalytic/jobs or email me bblair@catalytic.com

Senior Chatbot Engineer | https://catalytic.com | Chicago, IL | Fulltime | $100K - $120+K

We’re on a mission to elevate team operations. We are building Pushbot, a platform for business processes. We believe that the time has come to set aside misfit, clunky, and legacy solutions. It’s time to embrace the modern era of cloud computing, conversational UI, bots, mobility, machine learning, and beautifully-designed, user-centric interfaces.

We're looking for a senior-level engineer to lead development of our conversational interface to Pushbot. You will own the conversation engine that allows our customers to chat with Pushbot via email, Slack, HipChat, SMS, WeChat, etc. Your mission will be to ensure that users love interacting with Pushbot using natural, intuitive language. We have a working prototype in place for our pilot customers, so your focus will be on creating a solid foundation for us to build on.

Why Catalytic:

* We're solving a ubiquitous but unsexy problem

* Small team of well-funded technologist veterans w/ exits $1B+

* Team's worked together before

* Modern stack: Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch and others

* Good docs, extensive test coverage, automated deploys :)

https://angel.co/catalytic/jobs/122467-senior-chatbot-engine...

or email me ben@catalytic.com

Ha, yea. The Chicago region has a lot going for it but there are a few things that are really painful. Cloud tax? Brilliant Idea! Despite that, taxes and the like are modestly-sized constants. They haven't stopped businesses from growing exponentially here and I don't think they're a reason (alone) to relocate. Though there will certainly be edge cases where they add enough friction to prevent positive feedback loops from kicking in.

For Catalytic, we'll live or die based on whether we can quickly find the right colleagues and customers. This region has a lot of both. And there are some very real advantages to starting here (big fish in a little pond, etc) vs SF.

Catalytic | Chicago, IL and Naperville, IL ONSITE | Full-Time | http://catalytic.com/

We are a very early stage startup building a b2b product to vastly improve team and business operations. We were founded by engineers with track records of building hugely successful products and businesses. Our CEO Sean Chou built FieldGlass as CTO from founding to a very successful sale to SAP. Our CTO Ravi Singh has built over 300 mobile apps, founded several startups and is an advisor to several prominent VCs. We recently closed a seed round with backing from some of the top VCs in Chicago and the coasts.

Our stack is Node.js in AWS Lambda fronted by API Gateway and CloudFront. We’ve build an automated testing and deployment pipeline around GitHub, CircleCI and Slack. For storage we primarily use DynamoDB, S3 and ElasticSearch. Whether or not you’re already familiar with these or the dozen other services we use, together we’ll make sure you develop a working knowledge of them and eventually a deep expertise.

We're looking for folks who are kind, curious and tenacious and who have a solid understanding of CS fundamentals. Open roles are:

- Conversational NLP Engineer - Senior-level - build our chatbot / conversational UI.

- Backend Node.js Developer - Junior/mid-level - help make sure developers love the platform.

email me (VPE): ben@catalytic.com

This looks promising, and is definitely addressing a real problem. Even our relatively simple product is spread across dozens of private GitHub repos (lots of micro services, shared libraries and infrastructure-as-code repos).

Tracking issues that span repositories is enough of a problem that we had an intern take a stab at building a digraph of issues, with edges being references between issues (e.g., "requires #45"). We open-sourced the work in progress called issue-graph[1]. It has a long way to go before it's useful on it's own, but perhaps OP or others here would find it a useful jumping off point. We're very happy to take feedback.

I'm really looking forward to trying Codetree when it's ready. Derrick, feel free to email me (address in my profile) if you'd like some thoughts on the pain points I see. I would LOVE to pay for a product that addressed them.

[1] https://github.com/markitx/issue-graph

Chicago (remote possible) Full Time

Front-End Engineer at MarkITx

MarkITx is a growing startup looking for a front-end engineer to help us build web apps that will track, value and trade the world's datacenter hardware. We are disrupting the $312 billion secondary IT market and helping to make sure that equipment gets reused, not just recycled. We do that by bringing simplicity and transparency to a process that is currently painful, ugly and untrustworthy. We've got significant traction and funding, and have built one of the best teams in Chicago.

You'll craft readable, maintainable code that delivers a great user experience. You'll have primary responsibility for everything we send to the browser. Our team will support you with thoughtful UI/UX design and simple JSON REST APIs. You'll manage your projects and collaborate with the team primarily through GitHub and chat. With a fully automated test and deployment infrastructure, you'll ship several times a day, including your first day.

More details at http://jobs.markitx.com/#frontend

MarkITx -- Chicago, IL

In just 18 months, we’ve built the world’s largest B2B exchange for buying and selling IT hardware (anything that goes into a datacenter). Our members include some of the world’s premier financial exchanges, trading firms, data centers and cloud providers. We are bringing transparency and trust to a $350B market that is fragmented to hell and dominated by middlemen ripping off enterprises that don’t know the true value of their infrastructure.

We’re hiring for several technical and non-technical roles:

* Senior Engineer - build the beating heart of a commodities exchange in the cloud

* Front-end Developer - build the front-end infrastructure of the exchange

* Mobile Developer - bring consumer-level ease and beauty to datacenter management

* Data Scientist - help refine the predictive Kelley Blue Book of IT

* Technical Writer - help us show how and why commoditization will reshape the industry, speed up innovation, save billions and reduce e-waste

We’ve raised $3.3MM in funding and pay top of market, plus equity. We are not buying eyeballs in hopes of selling them later. We are attacking massive market inefficiencies and generating extremely healthy margins. We are both riding and driving a huge change in the way IT infrastructure is bought, used and sold.

We're pragmatists, not purists. We’ve bought into reality, whatever that might be, not married to our ideas. You'll fit in best if you are as well. We’re seasoned veterans with big wins and big, educational losses under our belts. We try to use the right technology for the job, with familiarity being a tie breaker. We’re not religious about platforms. Some things we use today: Node.js, ElasticSearch, Asgard, Redis and CouchDB and a slew of AWS services.

If any of that sounds interesting, please email me directly at benblair@markitx.com

Very excited! Anyone else coming from Chicago?

Chicago, IL

Help MarkITx[1] build the software systems that will track, value and trade the world’s IT infrastructure. Working side-by-side with our CTO Ben Blair (that's me) and our head of product Shawn Kelly, you’ll design and build a web of distributed systems sitting atop our AWS infrastructure. You'll have full ownership of your projects and the systems you work on. You'll never be micromanaged.

We're looking for engineers who have built, deployed and managed large distributed systems. We're pragmatists, not purists. We try to use the right technology for the job, with familiarity being a tie breaker. Some things we use today: Node.js, ElasticSearch, Redis and CouchDB and a slew of AWS services.

The types of project you might work on:

- An automated market making system for wholesalers

- An inventory import that can identify products in anything from poorly formatted spreadsheets to scanned invoice PDFs to photos of asset tags

- A public-facing API for asset valuation and trading

We Offer:

- Great work environment + generous equipment budget

- Base salary in the $110 - $130k range + significant equity

- Raise to $160 - $180k when we close our Series A

- Benefits including health, dental

About MarkITx

MarkITx is a B2B exchange for buying and selling IT hardware (anything that goes into a datacenter). We are disrupting the $350B secondary IT market by bringing simplicity and transparency to a process that is currently painful, ugly and untrustworthy. We are a well funded startup, working out of 1871. We are a very talented, deeply experienced and tight-knit team. We have some of the best backers and advisors in Chicago. We’ve proven the model, with over $60MM in orders and over $150k per month in transactions. We’re just getting started, and we need your help to scale.

Our culture is driven by a simple constraint: every colleague we add should make the rest of the team happier and better at their own jobs. That means talent density grows as we grow. It means we have zero tolerance for ego-driven BS. It means we’re in awe of what our colleagues are capable of. It means we have complete autonomy to identify and solve the problems in our domain. It means we care more about the win than we do about who did what to get us there.

Email me at ben@markitx.com if you're interested and tell me about what you've built.

[1] https://www.markitx.com

Location: Chicago, IL

Position: Software Engineer

Company: MarkITx

MarkITx is looking for talented generalists join our software engineering team. We want colleagues who are smart and get things done, who are inveterate builders, tinkerers and detectives. We hire people not experience levels, so we have a place for you whether you have been building real-time trading systems for a decade, or are fresh out of school.

MarkITx is a B2B exchange for buying and selling IT hardware (anything that goes into a datacenter). We are disrupting the $350B secondary IT market by bringing simplicity and transparency to a process that is currently painful, ugly and untrustworthy. We are a funded startup, working out of 1871. We are a very talented, deeply experienced and tight-knit team. We have some of the best backers and advisors in Chicago. We’ve proven the model, with over $20MM in orders and over $150k per week in transactions, roughly doubling every month. We’re just getting started, and we need your help to scale that.

Building a commodities exchange from scratch is an unique challenge. Working with a world class team of designers, front-end developers and industry experts, you will build the beating heart of our trading platform. You will become an expert in every layer of our stack, including Node.js, ElasticSearch, Redis and AWS. You’ll integrate with dozens of APIs from services like FedEx, Dwolla, Dropbox and NetSuite. You’ll help build and document our own API so that our users can tap directly into the exchange.

If that sounds like fun, see the details at https://www.markitx.com/careers#engineer

Ha, most definitely :) Our UI layer is not happy ATM. Hack hack hack...

Thanks. You end up creating that feed by the end of the walkthrough, but as you and several others point out, the payout is way too late. Based on all the useful feedback here, I'll add a TL;DR and rework it so that the first thing you see is more along the lines of "here's a feed with the stock prices attached to tweets" --> "See how it's done...".

Ah, yea we disabled the functionality that's not explicitly needed for the walk-through. As @tmcw suggests, "sign-up to enable this" would be much more helpful to all concerned than "forbidden". I'll fix that...

We've got a short video at http://cerrio.com/. It's pretty rough, but will give you a little more context if you're interested.

Seems like a good idea to formalize what everyone's already doing (though requiring PATCH implementation is a good idea). Am I reading it wrong or should the 5.7 Action section say that the REQUEST URI MUST contain a query component instead of "MUST NOT"? The example contains a query component and is the only way to distinguish it from a Create operation.

If you're doing anything with the real-time web (websockets, node, twisted, etc), you need to be there. If you look through the speaker list, you'll see there's almost no fluff, just lots of experienced implementors. I think the same will be true of the attendees.

To be clear, I'm not affiliated in anyway, just excited about attending.

Looks very useful as a github post-commit hook for catching browser-specific JavaScript errors.

Is this also meant to be used for testing usability across browsers? Like browserling but automated? If so, some specific examples on the docs page would be very helpful.

It's hard to underestimate the impact that working in a secretive industry has on your career and tools you can build on (points 4 and 8). Trading technology is driven by a really fantastic set of challenges. There are only a few other problem domains where you are forced to react semi-intelligently to millions of messages each second with microsecond latency. So there's some real innovation going on. But what Jason says about the closed culture is spot on.

Information only flows from one firm to another through hires. There is little open dialog between developers at different firms. For most of the last decade that I've been in the industry, the sheer scale of the technical challenges we were facing kept most of us innovating ahead of the consumer web (in terms of infrastructure tech -- don't ask us about UI). But now that the consumer web is going real-time, I expect that edge to evaporate quickly. Unless you want to play the high frequency game (and have access to the requisite large amount of capital), I would recommend a web start-up over a trading firm. Your salary will likely be lower, but you'll be happier, and may even have more upside.

- Ben

Disclaimer: I haven't fully made the leap myself yet. But I'm doing my best to spin out a real-time web start-up from our trading firm.

Write your own blog. I know it's an unnatural experience for those of us who would rather have our heads down coding, but it's worth it for several reasons:

1. You blog should speak with your own voice. Nobody can replicate your passion for what you're doing.

2. Nothing will help you refine your message more than trying (and initially failing) to communicate it.

3. Like it or not, your startup's success probably depends more on your ability to communicate than on your ability to code (you can already code, or you wouldn't be here). Doesn't mean you have to be awesome at it, but you do have to be good enough to get people to listen to what you're trying to say.

4. When, after lots of practice you do get good at it you'll actually start to enjoy sharing your thoughts with the world.

Good Luck-

- Ben