Hiring Rails Developers and QA

PatientsLikeMe is growing! We're looking for a few great Rails developers. If you don't know Rails but are eager to learn, start learning now and get in touch.

We're also looking for an experienced QA engineer to keep us honest and help us with automated acceptance/regression testing, among other things.

To get you psyched up about coming to work with us, I thought I'd share a little about our team, our culture, and how we get things done.

We have a couple of amazing designers on staff, Kate and Scott. We get to bring their works of art to life. Kate has lots of insight into usability and user testing, and Scott brings a wealth of knowledge about visualizations (and he paints astronauts, which is awesome).

We still support IE6. Yeah, that sucks, but a good chunk of our users (mostly patients) still use it. Lucky for us, Cris and Adam know all the tricks. Semantic markup, IE hacks, accessibility... we've got it all. Well, except mobile, but that can change.

We do all kinds of crazy, awesome things in our free time. You already know about Scott's astro-art. I created Twackit to play around with the Twitter API. James created a really cool visualization of the MBTA system. Steve is a Solar System Ambassador for the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and a school committee member. Jeff "Mav" Dwyer wrote a book about GWT (don't worry, we won't make you read it) and hands out Google Wave invites like they're candy. Rich helped Dan Cederholm (yes, the Dan Cederholm) build Dribbble, and he barely beat me in the finals of our Darts Madness tournament. Joe, Kate and I helped get HealthDataRights.org off the ground. Joe, Steve, Cris, and I participated in last year's Rails Rumble and launched The Quest for Life. I'm sure I'm forgetting someone or something, but that should give you an idea of how we roll.

Also, everyone loves Star Trek IV but me -- that's the one where they go back in time to save the humpback whales, which is stupid.

We have an in-house research team that sometimes makes me feel like I don't know shit about shit. The stack of journal publications and presentations of their research can probably be blamed for most of the deforestation of the past 10 years. Our researchers help us figure out what data is interesting to patients and what's interesting for research purposes, and they make sure we ask the right questions the right way (something about science and bias and blah blah, etc.).

Everyone has a MacBook Pro and an external monitor. We use VirtualBox to do IE testing. Some of us commute from out of town so we usually telecommute a couple days a week, but we stay in touch with IM and Campfire.

We use Git for version control. It's pretty awesome. It's super-easy to work on branches. We're always creating remote branches to work on new features in isolation, and short-lived local branches for quick bug fixes.

We release in 2 week iterations. Fast enough to get stuff out, not so fast you lose track of what's going on.

There's still a lot of legacy stuff that uses ERB and regular CSS, but all our new stuff is Haml and Sass.

We have dartboard that gets a lot of use, a Nintendo Wii (with Rock Band, of course), and we've been known to watch an episode of Star Trek or a certain movie featuring The Dude after work while we sip White Russians (or Caucasians, if you prefer). Three desks double as a conference room table which doubles as a ping pong table, and lo the balls fly furiously.

It's rare to find a job that's challenging, fun, or makes a difference in people's lives, but PatientsLikeMe offers all of that in one place. A really great perk of working at PatientsLikeMe is that we have an opportunity to improve the lives of real people -- thousands of patients with life-changing conditions. They're a very involved user-base, with no shortage of ideas and feedback.

Oh, and we have direct deposit! You gotta have direct deposit.