Job Opportunity at Tucows: Senior Application Developer

Are you a programmer looking for work? Tucows — where I’m the Tech Evangelist — has another job opening that might be right up your alley: Senior Application Developer.

What Does Tucows Do, Anyway?

If you’re interested in this sort of job, you might want to know the sort of business we’re in. Simply put, Tucows is a wholesaler of these specific internet services:

• Domain names
• Hosted email
• Hosted anti-spam solutions
• Digital certificates
• Managed DNS
• Website Builder
• Blogware
• Billing software for ISPs and hosting services

As a wholesaler, we don’t directly sell these services to end-users. Rather, we partner with people — many of whom are ISPs and hosting companies — who then resell these services on their own or as part of their own suite of services. Our partners can provision these services to their customers either via a web-based interface or by using our APIs.

By buying these services from us and reselling them instead of setting up and maintaining these services themselves, our partners can worry less about the tech and maintenance aspects of these services and concentrate on provisioning them to their customers and providing them with great service.

The Sort of Person We’re Lookng For

Make sure you read this article over at the blog Creating Passionate Users in which Kathy Sierra writes about companies where people are really into their jobs:

People ask me, “How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?” Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Passion for our profession and the kind of work we do? Crucial. If I own company FOO, I don’t need employees with a passion for FOO. I want those with a passion for the work they’re doing. The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they’re trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.

That’s been my experience here at Tucows: the company does a pretty good job at supporting people in their tasks, but also staying the hell out of their way and not binding them down with too many diktats. Do you prefer to work using editor X running on operating system Y? Do it; we don’t mandate what’s on your desktop. Got ideas on how to do things more effectively and efficiently? The folks here are pretty good at listening to them. Developers here are empowered to be creative while doing their job.

All that freedom means that we’re looking for a developer who’s a self-starter, capable of working with minimal supervision — or none at all.You’ll be part of a team that will be both building new services as well as enhancing, maintaining and supporting existing ones. You also have to be a good team player, leader and teacher, as you may be involved with mentoring and helping junior members of the team.

The systems you’ll be working on are big — we’re talking millions of transactions a day, for which our customers and customers’ customer have paid. In such an environment, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so we’re looking for someone who can crank out high quality code.

You have to be the kind of person who lives to work on challenging problems. There’ll be a lot of ground to cover, and the industry changes pretty quickly, so you’ve got to be the sort of person who wants to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, while solving those problems. We’re looking for someone who takes pride in their work and wants to be proudly describe the type of problems they’re working on.

There’s more about the job, including how to apply — it’s over at this article on the Tucows Blog.