** Position Closed **

This is a role which will suit someone who is looking for the opportunity to make their own mark, shape a major new platform and be involved in one of the most exciting start-ups of 2014.

About the company

• The business is a real-time sports media platform founded by an experienced team of sports marketing executives, former athletes, high profile journalists and national newspaper editors.
• Within the next two years they will create the world’s largest sporting social network (> 20 million users) connecting people with the sports they love in a deeper and more meaningful way than in any other destination.
• It has already partnered with some of the biggest global sporting stars
• External finance has been raised and the business is fully funded for the next few years.
• The platform will be built around the core functionality of a micro-blogging site like Twitter.
• Launch will be in mid-2014.

The Role

Now that the foundations for the business are in place, it is looking for a full-stack engineer to help build and grow the platform.

• This is a lynchpin role and will include defining the architecture, building a highly scalable, robust and secure data application and growing a team of developers and engineers.
• The platform will grow very quickly, so scaling a real-time service while maintaining the highest quality of service is key.
• The role will involve managing build agencies, then establishing a team of in-house developers as the business grows.

The Person

You should be comfortable working within the entire development stack from building and configuring servers and services, through to implementing user interactions and design.

This is a Greenfield opportunity so you aren’t shy about learning new technologies or programming languages and won’t hesitate to challenge our design choices and force us to become a better team.

Responsibilities include:

• Build and maintain a high-performance & scalable web platform
• Rapidly iterate on platform features, developing elegant solutions with teams in both the UK and USA
• Proactively look for ways to improve performance, simplify interactions, and make the site perform better
• Collaborate closely on realising a shared vision with the commercial and content teams

Desired skills:

• top-notch programming skills in an object-oriented language like Java or C++
• Good understanding of OS concepts & internals with Linux/Unix/BSD, and practical knowledge of shell scripting
• Expert PHP programming skills, both Functional and OOP
• experience as a full-stack engineer
• Mobile development experience with Mobile web or Android/iOS (or a strong desire to learn)
• Can be autonomous and self-driven

Other Qualifications:

• a highly experienced software engineer with a strong track record of working on large scale distributed web systems (ideally consumer web environments).
• understand how to scale a real-time service while maintaining the Quality of Service
• demonstrate a deep understanding of how to manage data in a real time cloud environment using open source technologies.
• be fully conversant with security, data latency and web performance matters
• B.Sc or higher in Computer science, or equivalent