We're hiring!

These days, it seems like everybody's hiring. Right now, we're looking for a good solid mid-level Perl hacker or two. We're also always on the look out for an ace UI/UE engineer, although we don't have a formal posting for that right now.

Perl Hacker

About us

We're Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located in Somerville, Mass. We build software and sell support, training, consulting and custom development. Our main product, RT (Request Tracker) is the premiere opensource issue tracking system, downloaded by about 3000 new organizations every month. We've been around since the fall of 2001 and are entirely self-funded. O'Reilly Media published our first book, RT Essentials , last fall. This winter, we unveiled Jifty, our next-generation web application toolkit. We're currently hard at work on our next new product. Things just keep getting busier.

Perl Hacker

About the job

We're looking for a mid-level Perl Hacker to help us enhance and refine RT, Jifty, and our Next Big Thing. You'll be responsible for everything from implementing new features across all our products to testing and applying user-contributed patches to our released software. In a typical week, you'll probably spend about half your time working on customer projects and half working on internal and opensource projects.

The hours are flexible and we all telecommute some of the time...though we're just about to move into new office space in the heart of Davis Sq, Somerville. We do just about EVERYTHING online and on the phone. You should be comfortable using email and instant messaging systems to collaborate and get work done. This job doesn't formally require your full-time presence in Boston, though it would certainly be an advantage.

About you

You should be a self-starter who has some experience with Perl, as well as a bit of experience with at least a few of the following:

Test driven development
User interface design
HTML::Mason templating
Documentation
Web Services
Cascading Style Sheets
Javascript / AJAX
SQL databases
MVC frameworks
Optimization and Profiling
Subversion and SVK

It's ok if you don't know everything out of the gate, but you should be able to learn on the fly and be comfortable asking questions when you get in over your head. RT is a large codebase to dive into (47000 lines of libraries, 27000 of templates) so you should be prepared to work with a project that's too big to hold in your head at once. If you want to see what sort of trouble you're getting yourself into, download a copy of RT's source code from:

http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt.tar.gz

We're a small company and the boss is typically overextended. You should be comfortable working independently or in small teams, prioritizing tasks on your own, and juggling tasks and projects. You need to be able to tell when you're out of your depth and ask for help.

Compensation

DOE - This is a full-time salaried position, but the details are negotiable. We're a small, self funded company. The standard benefits apply, of course: health insurance, dental insurance and junk food to make that dental insurance worthwhile.

How to apply

Send a something approximating a cover letter, a resume in plain text, HTML or PDF form and a sample of your Perl code to resumes@bestpractical.com. If you're involved in opensource development of one kind or another, please tell us about it. If you have a CPAN ID, tell us what it is. We won't consider applications without a code sample. We'll be paying particular attention to the readability, comments and tests.