Amazon Web Services is growing and we can’t hire people fast enough. For my team, I’m looking for some really fantastic PHP developers. Interested? Read on, take my advice, then get in touch at rparman (_et_) amazon.
About me
First off, I’m not a recruiter. My name is Ryan and I’m the creator of the AWS SDK for PHP. In 2007, I created Tarzan (later renamed to CloudFusion) which became the focus of Jeff Barr’s book “Host Your Web Site In The Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy”. In 2010, Amazon hired me to fork CloudFusion and create the official AWS SDK for PHP. I now lead the PHP team at AWS Developer Resources.
What we want
We’re eagerly looking to hire some exceptional PHP developers to help us create the next generation of our SDK, build better PHP developer tools, and a bunch of other top-secret things that haven’t been announced yet. We have lots of really awesome ideas, but we don’t have enough people to make them a reality — that’s where you come in.
About you
Our ideal cohort would be both a PHP developer as well as a computer scientist (computer scientist for the interview process, PHP developer for the actual work). Recruiting wants to see a résumé, but I want to see a GitHub account. Demonstrable open source work/contributions and prior experience with AWS are pluses. Knowing WTF you’re doing, and having an on-fire passion for delivering the best possible user experience is a requirement as far as I’m concerned.
Our mantra
I’m a firm believer that our SDK should be so mind-blowingly awesome that it causes you to have an involuntary bowel movement when you use it. If it isn’t, then we’re not meeting our bar for quality, serendipity and user delight (the measurable metric of which is the number of tweets and blog posts gushing with praise for the SDK). The SDK should be so intuitive that it doesn’t require a user manual — yet at the same time we should strive to provide the best documentation and learning experience on the planet.
What we do
Here is a list of things that we do regularly, so experience with these things or an aptitude for learning to swim after being thrown in the deep-end will take you far:
- PHP and web development.
- Unit testing, integration testing, code reviews and QA.
- Customer support, documentation and usage examples.
- Code profiling and benchmarking.
- Linux, networking, web server configuration, processing lots of log files, regular expressions.
- Compiling and debugging
- Agile/Scrum
- Some Ruby, some JavaScript, lots of XML and JSON.
- Knowing the difference between done and perfect.
- Fixing random weirdness in the middle of the night because your on-call pager went off.
- …and a bunch of other stuff I can’t think of right now.
Culture
We work in self-directed, self-managed teams. If you’re the type of person who needs to be told what to do by a manager, you won’t fit in here. If you can see a need, develop a solution through to completion, hassle other teams for any dependencies, and deliver in a timely manner, you’ll do well. If you thrive in a startup environment, you’ll thrive here. If you have strong opinions but still know how to check your ego at the door and work together to find the best solution for the customer, you’ll do well here. If you don’t like how we’re doing something, propose something better — but be prepared to show us the evidence that backs up your assertion.
What we’re looking for
We’re not looking for rockstars, ninjas or whatever the current recruiter-speak is these days. Rockstars are egomaniacs, and you can never tell where the heck a ninja is or what he’s doing. Instead, we’re looking for someone who is passionate, inspired, has awesome engineering chops, and will bring their A-game every single time. Programming is easy. Putting a dent in the universe is hard. You should come work with us, and help make that kind of impact in the PHP community.
P.S.: We’re also eagerly looking for Ruby, Node.js, iOS and Android developers. Heck — if you’re an exceptional developer, we want to talk to you.