Senior Software Engineer | LAMP

About us:

* 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 17 million times, and is played over 2 million times a day around the world. 32% of all of iPhone/iPod Touch users have downloaded one of our applications
* Mobile apps are the next frontier. Contact us if you’d like to join a market leader

About the Job:

* Join the small, agile team that owns our back end LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) infrastructure
* Our back end is substantial because it serves all of our applicaitons: pushing frequent updates to in-game content; tracking all usage; kicking out analytics; and powering 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 ~ 300 Mbit/sec of traffic to ~ 20M uniques - and 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:

* Write code. Copious amounts of clean code - with excellent test coverage
* Proactively optimize for scalability, efficiency and maintainability in a practical, scrappy way.
* Collaborate with iPhone developers, Javascript hackers, designers and our executive team to define, refine, prioritize and ship new features
* Build new products and features, but derive just as much pleasure from polishing and fixing bugs

Requirements:

* You've been part of a (>5 person) startup engineering team for a product that grew quickly, and have developed a passion for building large-scale, multi-tiered, high-performance distributed sofware.
* Productive with minimal supervision. Strong prioritization instincts. Ability to quickly and adeptly manipulate existing code vs. re-writing
* A strong eye for object oriented design, code re-usability and maintainability
* Thrive in small, collaborative, energetic teams
* Enjoy working in an environment that ships frequent, small iterations - where plans are constantly in flux and good ideas triumph quickly. Waterfall was 10 years ago.
* Communicate well out loud, on paper and in code. A knack for asking the right questions at the right time
* The intersection of community, the web, mobile, music and gaming is a place you’d love to live for the next couple of years
* Experienced but still hungry. Results oriented. Passionate. Up for a challenge. Motivated self starter

Nice to have:

* Experience with distributed architectures, database tuning, load balancing, memcached, virtualization and other stuff you need to do to scale while improving performance / reliability and keeping costs down
* Expereince with different SDLC models and productivity-and-quality-oriented software tools.
* Experience with Social Network APIs (Facebook, Twitter, OpenID) and/or cloud computing services (EC2)
* Experience building applications for the mobile web
* Expertise in HTML, CSS, Javascript and other presentation layer technologies
* 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.
* Write a cover letter. Applications without cover letters will not be considered. We need people who can write code and English. Please discuss relevant system(s) you've 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.