Opportunities at Stipple

Know someone who would be a good fit? Stipple offers up to $5,000 for referrals!

What We Offer

Employment at Stipple comes with multiple benefits, including:

Medical, dental, and vision insurance
A signing bonus of up to $15,000
The chance to work with a small, capable team where you can make a real contribution
A great location in the heart of South Beach, a block away from AT&T Park
An open, laid-back atmosphere without offices or cubicles
We throw killer parties

Software Engineers

Stipple is seeking engineers who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty in any part of the stack. You should be a self-starter with the confidence and ability to handle complex projects. Stipple is an engineering-driven company. We like to move quickly and hope you do, too.

The software we use at Stipple includes Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Redis, jQuery, Backbone.js, Compass, Git, RSpec, and Solr, as well as some projects written in Erlang and C++. We use open-source software whenever possible.

We're looking for people local to the San Francisco Bay area who are up to the challenge. Our South Beach office is a cool piece of history. We'll tell you the story when you get here.

Senior Software Engineer

You've spent a lot of time in the trenches. You have experience in software engineering in a startup environment. You understand engineering for the web, along with the strengths and weaknesses of the platform.

We're looking for someone who...

has a love and zeal for engineering software
comfortable wearing multiple hats in a fast-paced startup environment
has strong knowledge of Javascript, jQuery, and the understands the differences between engineering a traditional OOP app versus one that uses Javascript's prototypal inheritance system.
has strong knowledge of Ruby and Rails
is comfortable with a full application stack - if you're a "frontend" or "backend" person, this position isn't for you.
is on-board with BDD/TDD
is comfortable with day-to-day use of Git

Things we would love for you to have experience with, but don't require:

Developing single-page applications with Backbone.js or other JS framework
Writing cross-browser CSS (i.e. dealing with IE7 and 8 in addition to modern browsers)
Developing applications that run in the cloud over multiple instances
Programming with polyglot persistance (i.e. a single application using multiple datastores)
Consuming external HTTP APIs

Junior Software Engineer

You're a fresh face on the block, and are looking for a challenge.

We're looking for junior engineers who...

have a love and zeal for engineering software
have experience developing for the web in a modern language (Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.)
have knowledge of SQL and SQL databases.
are interested in test-driven development

It you have experience in the following, it would be awesome, but isn't required:

Experience engineering with Javascript and jQuery
Experience writing CSS
Experience with NoSql datastores, e.g. Redis

Code Sample

We request that all engineering candidates, both senior and junior, write a small piece of code so we can see their chops. These are not intended to take a long period of time to complete; we just want to see your problem solving methods and techniques.

Please choose one of the following, and include the solution with your resume.

Image Mosaic

Create an image mosaic program, which accepts a requested final size, and a list of images. Your program should run from the command line, as in the following example:

./image_mashup wxh img1 img2 img3 img4 img5 etc...

It should output a single image called output.png, in PNG format, in the same directory as the script.

Input images can be in JPEG, PNG, or GIF formats.

You should catch cases of missing widthxheight, negative or zero values for width or height, zero images passed on the command line, or being unable to find any of the images passed (i.e. if one of the images does not exist, the entire operation should fail).

Your program should 'slice-up' the image into some number of pieces, then use those pieces in the final mosaic. You can 'cut-up' the original images in any way or shape you wish, and chunks can be reused as many times as necessary to fill the requested space. Not all chunks have to be used.

Example:

./image_mosaic 150x150 100x100.png 110x92.png 80x20.png 40x60.gif

Using input images:

Should output something like:

What to Do?

Use one or more online sources to find events in some area, then cross reference them with the weather forecast at that time in the place the event is happening to avoid events that will have bad weather.

This should be written as a command-line script.

Input: A 5 digit US ZIP code.

Output: A list of upcoming events (at least for that day, further ahead if you would like) with the title, the time, the place, and the forecast weather that day. For this exercise, it should be some fashion of 'Sunny', 'Partly Cloudy', or similar. Events on days with precipitation should be filtered out. It's ok to have an empty list if the weather is bad. Temperature doesn't matter.

Example:

./what_to_do 94107

Hotel Utah Saloon - Open Mike
2011-03-07 12:00 AM
Hotel Utah Saloon
500 Fourth street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Clear/Sunny

SVMN Microfinance 201 Course
2011-03-07 06:30 PM
San Francisco
City-wide
San Francisco, CA 94107
Clear/Sunny

San Francisco Salsa Dancing with Live Music and Free Lessons
2011-03-07 07:00 PM
Cafe Cocomo
672 Indiana Street @ Mariposa and Nineteenth
San Francisco, CA 94107
Clear/Sunny

LEADING BY DESIGN FELLOWS PROGRAM Information Session
2011-03-07 07:00 PM
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Clear/Sunny

Please send code samples or resumes to engineering@stippleit.com. Please include the position you're interested in, as well as salary requirements. No recruiters, please.
Non-job-related queries should be sent to support@stippleit.com.

Work at Stipple

Help us change the way the web approaches images.

What We Offer

Software Engineers

Senior Software Engineer

Junior Software Engineer

Image Mosaic

Example:

What to Do?

Example:

PDF2TXT

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