We don't believe in putting people in boxes. As a tight-knit, cross-functional team, everyone gets to wear a few different hats. We believe this is a good thing - it's something we embrace as an overall strength for our team.
Below you'll find a rough outline of technical skill groupings. Our expectation is that good candidates will see things in more than one grouping to identify with. Further, we'd expect that the groups you identify with two years from now will likely be different - your position at Crowd Favorite will evolve to reflect this.
Design
You've got a background in fine arts and experience creating strong, compelling visual designs and brand identities. You can throw together an identity guide in a heartbeat and have a few dozen favorite Pantone colors at your fingertips. You understand that design is communication. You have reasons for your design choices and can explain them with passion and conviction.
You can bang out wireframes with the fury of a bear that has the fury of two bears. You love discussing the nuances of subtle details, because you know that the details are the opportunity to take something good and make it great.
Web Application Interface Designer
You see inspiration for new user interface ideas while walking down the street. You appreciate the value of convention but aren't afraid to try something new if you think it's better. You take an intentional approach and can articulate reasons for your choices and enjoy the debate over merits of different approaches.
Your attention to detail means you are constantly frustrated by little things in the tools you use and you constantly find yourself thinking of little ways things could be made better. You also enjoy speculating on the thought process that caused someone to reach the design decisions they did.
You enjoy creating polished visual designs and might also do some prototyping in HTML and CSS (and JavaScript to highlight certain interactions). Above all, you enjoy a surpassing satisfaction when shipping a truly elegant finished product.
Front-End Development
It's not so much that a pixel-perfect cut up of a design is a goal, it's that doing anything else is a disgrace. A pixel of baseline difference between Firefox and Chrome will keep you from sleeping at night until it's fixed. You understand design principles, spacing, balance and the kind of design that works on the web.
You understand how browsers work and know what differences to expect from different flavors of IE, whatever version of Chrome and Firefox we're up to now, and the myriad of mobile WebKit browsers out there. Semantic HTML5 markup, elegantly structured CSS and image sprites are just how things are done. You have a drive to create great user experiences and understand how to use CSS and JavaScript animations and features to achieve your vision.
Web Development
You make the web work. While you may have created your own CMS, MVC web application framework and JavaScript framework in the past, you have an Open Source hacker's mentality and enjoy working with WordPress, Kohana/Rails/Django and jQuery (and benefitting from those development communities). You have a pragmatic approach to building on the web, but enjoy the opportunity to create custom libraries when they make sense.
You have a sophisticated understanding of how the web is delivered; minifying and combining your CSS and JavaScript files is just part of creating a website or web application. The benefits of using AJAX in specific situations are self-evident. You've experimented with a few different programming languages and have various things you like about them, but understand that elegant and crappy code can be written in any language. You understand the benefits of the MVC style, and the dangers of premature optimization.
Data is data; you're equally comfortable connecting to MySQL and the Twitter API. You understand how to optimize your data queries and how to test the performance of the code you write. Error and exception handling code is carefully considered and well tested and because sometimes the database isn't available or Twitter's API is down.
Architecture
You are best known for your unwavering confidence in your ability to quickly learn and master whatever technology is the best fit for the task at hand. Your confidence would be considered arrogance or cockiness if it weren't for the fact you always manage to deliver.
Your experience in tinkering with different toolsets for fun makes it easy for you to make technology choices based on both a conceptual understanding of them and relevant hands-on experience. You know when to implement a memcache cluster or break some data out of MySQL and set it up on a NoSQL store with a high performance queue and RESTful interface.
The entire OAuth2 flow and the underlying data structures of your favorite DVCS are at your fingertips in the event someone asks a question while you're within arms reach of a whiteboard. You enjoy teaching and sharing your passion with others, as long as they are bright and curious and want to learn.
DevOps
What's that? Several vague symptoms of a problem on a system you've never seen before? Sure, you can get that taken care of - you'll just need a shell and a sudo account and no one bothering you for a few minutes thank-you-very-much.
Clustering machines and running performance tests is fun, but what's really fun is running the same test a few hours later after a few surgical tweaks to see the HUGE PERFORMANCE GAINS you managed to squeeze out of it. You understand that the developers creating applications to run on your beautiful server configurations are partners to work with rather than the enemy that is causing you headaches.
You have Nagios monitoring set up on your sister's cat's blog because a few months ago it went down for 3 hours before someone noticed. It's other people's neckbeards that get made fun of - yours is just awesome.
Internships
We are happy to bring in bright, curious and talented designers and developers and give them an environment where they can learn and grow, and share their fresh ideas with us. We accept intern candidates year-round in part and full-time capacities.
Making Our Projects Great
Our project manager and QA positions don't have quite as much explicit cross-over as the technical positions on our team. Instead of having to wear several technical hats at once, our PM and QA teams merely have to understand the technologies and architecture of our products and projects as well as the various user stories and high-level business goals of the things they are managing and testing.
Project Management
You are a master communicator and linguist, fluent in "client", "developer" and adept at picking up new dialects and working with unique personalities. You can immediately take the temperature of a room and find the best way to approach a needed discussion.
You get things quickly, have high standards and are comfortable taking a stand when you feel the team is coming up short of it's capabilities. You are an expert juggler and aren't afraid to mix in the flaming clubs and knives when necessary. You have impeccable judgement and know when to crack the whip and when to reserve judgement and ask questions.
You are willing to deliver bad news when it is necessary. You understand that some decisions end up being mistakes, but you aren't afraid to make them because you know that they bring with them valuable lessons; and that mistakes made in good faith are rarely fatal.
You've lived on the web for years and understand what it does best as a platform. You've seen what works, and what doesn't work - both as an end user and as the manager of successful and failed projects. Technical experience is a plus, but not a pre-requisite.
Quality Assurance & Special Projects
You love the web and understand how websites and web applications work. You are an explorer and a power user, but you are adept at putting yourself in someone else's shoes and looking for both functional flaws and identifying things that could and should be made easier.
You can easily synthesize lots of information, then mix in your own ideas and experience to make sure that developer "blind spots" are properly accounted for. You take pride in making sure that everything that is shipped is well tested and of the highest quality.
You think creatively, embrace both user and automated testing, love learning new things, and aren't scared by technical challenges.
Secrets of Your Success
The people that excel at Crowd Favorite are self-starters who embrace a challenge. They love that each project brings with it an opportunity to creatively solve problems and learn something new. If you are a good fit for our team, you will likely find yourself nodding along as you read the sentiments below.
You are glad to work without babysitters or micromanagers. You thrive in an environment where you can take ownership of your projects. You love to take an opportunity and run with it, but understand the importance of communicating, collaborating and planning with the team.
You don't back down when you believe in your ideas, but are open to learning about better options from others and care more about getting the right solution than "winning" an argument.
You can't wait to share something you just learned with others, and understand that code reviews and critiques are a way for you to grow and improve. You believe in developing, maintaining and evolving a set of best practices. You have a love for creating tools and products for both users and developers. You are always learning - constantly iterating and improving.
Philosophy and Culture
We pride ourselves in having a culture where everyone pushes each other to step up their game. The opportunity to work with the latest and greatest technologies brings with it an expectation that everyone is constantly learning, growing and contributing new ideas to the team.
We believe in the excellence that comes from creative thinking and problem solving in a truly merit-based environment. Your ideas and execution are what define your position on the team. Everyone on the team has an opportunity to shape the technical choices we make, and has the responsibility to make sure that the solutions we create are elegant. Our developers make sure that our architecture, frameworks and coding standards are above reproach while our designers are just as fanatical about the visual design and user experience of each of our projects.
A developer-founded and developer-led company has a different culture than a sales or marketing driven company. We focus on the product and in creating things that are technically excellent; and let our resulting reputation act as our sales and marketing pitch.
We live in Colorado; in a place where people get out and do things. We work hard, but we believe in balance and creating a sustainable environment for our team.
Benefits
The best things about working at Crowd Favorite are the developer-centric environment, the great team to collaborate with, and the interesting and challenging work. You can choose your development tools from your OS to your text editor. We have tech lunches every other week where we share things we've learned and ask "has anyone tried X?".
We're serious about work-life balance. We offer the rare opportunity to build with the latest tech on a broad range of projects without requiring the 60-80 hour/week commitment necessary in most start-up environments.
Whether it's a weekend on the slopes in the winter or a biking and golf weekend in the summer, the Crowd Favorite Mountain Retreat in Breckenridge is available to the entire team for year-round getaways (and you can bring your family and friends with you).
Of course we offer the standard stuff: market competitive salaries, 3 weeks of vacation per year, health benefits, a retirement plan and a conference room Stormtrooper.
Go ahead and strut your stuff. You know you want to.
Think you're a great fit for our team? Please send examples of your work along with relevant accomplishments, goals, hopes and dreams to jobs@crowdfavorite.com.
Don't forget your online presence. We'd like to see links to your profile on:
- Your Website
- GitHub
- Dribble
- WordPress.org
- etc.
