Tapulous is the #1 developer of iPhone games. We are a profitable <20 person team in downtown Palo Alto, CA. We are growing FAST.
Our flagship title, Tap Tap Revenge has been downloaded 20+million times. 32% of all of iPhone/iPod touch users have downloaded the game and it's played over 2 million times a day around the World.
Mobile is the next frontier. Contact us if you’d like to join the market leader.
About the Job:
Lead the small, agile team that owns and scales our back end LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) infrastructure.
Our back end is substantial because it serves all of our applications: pushing frequent updates to in-game content; tracking usage; kicking out analytics; and powering a multiplayer system that supports thousands of concurrent matches. Most of our back end rolls up into a series of RESTful APIs used by our client side developers. Today we push ~ 600 Mbit/sec of traffic to ~ 20M uniques - and we are growing quickly.
Jump in to a rapidly scaling environment - because you've done it before and LOVED every minute of it.
Make an instant and direct impact, shipping stuff to (and delighting) millions of people every week.
Responsibilities:
Take ownership of our back end: set the goals, decide the approach, do the work, live with your decisions.
Lead and grow our back end team - help hire, motivate and retain amazing people.
Be our sultan of scale, living and breathing reliabilty and robustness. Proactively optimize for scalability, efficiency and maintainability in a practical, scrappy way.
Write code - preferably the hard parts that lots of people use. Review code. Help make others better at coding.
Collaborate with iPhone developers, Javascript hackers, designers and our executive team to define, refine, prioritize and ship new features.
Requirements:
You've scaled a LAMP-based system from 20-40 servers to 100+ servers. This is not negotiable. If you've never done this before and know someone who has, please forward them this job description so we can hire them, and then they can hire you.
When we bat around phrases like "terabytes served," "millions of hits," and "millions of uniques," you don't bat an eyelash; you've personally built software that's handled this kind of scale before.
Possess a strong eye for object-oriented design, code re-usability and maintainability - and you encourage your team to develop these skills.
Communicate well out loud, on paper and in code.
Highly technical coder. Collaborative team player. Results oriented. Passionate. Up for a challenge. Motivated self-starter.
Nice to Have:
Very strong open source skills; it would be great if you'd made a significant contribution to a major open source project in the past.
Experience with hardware selection and infrastructure vendor management.
Experience with different SDLC models and productivity- and quality-oriented software tools.
Formal training in computer science (bachelors, masters, whatever).
How to Apply:
Play Tap Tap Revenge. No seriously, please play before you apply. We will talk to you about the experience as part of the interview process. Borrow a friend's iPhone if you need to.
Write a cover letter. Applications without cover letters will not be considered. We need people who can write code and English. Please discuss the relevant LAMP system you scaled and why this job sounds fun.
When you finish your job application we'll show how you are connected to our team on LinkedIn. We strongly prefer applications with endorsements. Please ask anyone we know in common to endorse your job application.
You must be authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis for any employer. We will not sponsor visas, nor will we hire consultants through sub-contractors that hold your visa.
