Scout Labs is building a new way for people in companies to listen to and engage with customers out across the web, and is “one of the best new companies this year” according to Techcrunch editor Mike Arrington. Scout Labs is located in downtown San Francisco, offers full health benefits and early-stage stock equity. For the right people, we are willing to contribute to the cost of relocation to the Bay Area.

Here is the list of positions currently available:

• Quality Assurance Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer
• Data Lead Engineer

Quality Assurance Engineer

We are looking for an experienced, enthusiastic Quality Assurance (QA) engineer who can hit the ground running and establish a QA practice quickly and efficiently. The ideal candidate will over time develop Scout Labs’ QA department. This position presents an opportunity to work closely with the engineering team in a rapid development environment to achieve superior code and data quality, as well as with the product team to endlessly improve our software-as-a-service product as we get closer to launch.

Duties / Responsibilities

• Design, implement and execute comprehensive test plans.
• Create and maintain detailed release plans and release procedures.
• Identify release risks and issues, and work to resolve or escalate.
• Run all production releases, coordinating with other teams.
• Manage deployments to and configurations of pre-production environments.
• Collaborate with Product Management, Software Engineering, and Operations on defining new quality initiatives.
• Support quality initiatives by building and executing test tools.
• Communicate status updates for releases and quality initiatives.
• Communicate with product developers, technical operations and architects on product issues.
• Support development in troubleshooting of critical bugs.
• Develop and apply customized testing strategies that include data, regression, load, stress and scalability testing.
• Coordinate execution of automated testing, user acceptance testing, regression and integration testing with appropriate groups.

Requirements

• 5+ years of Software Testing experience in a scalable software as a service environment.
• Ability to function and interact well in a dynamic startup environment.
• Solid Perl and shell scripting skills under Linux and Solaris.
• Passion for testing and the ability to work independently on diverse problems.
• Superior analytical and problem solving skills.
• Diverse interests and a passion for technology.
• BS or MS in CS, Engineering or similar.
• Knowledgeable in QA best practices for web based services.
• Experience working in an Agile development environment.
• Experience in working with version control and automated continuous builds (we use subversion and Cruise Control).
• Thorough knowledge of Software Development Life cycle and QA processes.

Nice to have

• Experience working with complex Java and search based systems.
• Experience in managing the QA function for an internet-focused software development team.
• Experience in stress and volume testing.

Characteristics of Success at Scout Labs

• Strong customer orientation, both internally and externally.
• Strategic thinking both technically and business-wise.
• Ability to execute successfully on business and technology strategy.
• Flexibility to shift priorities based on changing business needs.
• Self-motivated, curious, responsible, and flexible.
• Desire to work in a fast-paced, evolving, and dynamic environment.
• Ability to work in a team environment without letting your ego get in the way.

Senior Software Engineer

We are looking for an extremely capable individual with a background in search or high transaction rate back-end systems. The ideal candidate would be someone with a software architecture background who wants to make a difference in a high energy, small team environment. If you can design and build systems that hold up to processing load and provide superior search results, this is an opportunity to work with very senior search and NLP professionals and learn from the best.

Requirements

• 7 or more years of programing experience with distributed systems that have high availability and performance requirements.
• Familiarity with general software development practices and the ability to work independently in a small company.
• A work history that demonstrates active participation in all stages of the software life-cycle.
• Experience with most of the following technologies: Java, Lucene (index design, creation, search optimization), REST, XML, Linux, Solaris, RSS aggregation, BDB, and MySQL.
• A BS or equivalent degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or another field that requires strong analytical skills.
• Experience with or a strong interest in search and information retrieval technology.

Desired

• Experience with Lucene or Vector Model retrieval system or a strong interest in learning those.
• Experience producing software that meets result quality requirements.
• A theoretical or practical background in search technology and experience with high update rates and/or low fetch-to-serve turnarounds.
• Familiarity with a variety of relevancy measures and the ability to develop new and/or hybrid measures tailored to specific business requirements, particularly in the area of search results.
• Experience with content analysis and link/graph analysis for search meta-data.

Data Lead Engineer

Scout Labs needs you in its quest to index “human expression” in the form of consumer-generated media (blogs, user-reviews, image and video-sharing sites, discussion forums) so that we can analyze it and provide insight to organizations everywhere. We’re looking for people who live and breathe data acquisition and who love the challenge of bringing structure to the chaos.

You will be:

• Our “data czar”, tasked with acquiring human expression on the web and wherever else we can find it
• Managing and expanding our RSS feed-fetcher and various other commercial and open source data feeds
• Improving the data we have available by keeping it clean of duplicate data, correctly understanding file formats, dealing properly with encoding by building infrastructure and processes
• Continually evolving our data pipeline infrastructure for speed and accuracy
• Working with the QA team to develop unit tests for the data pipeline
• Eternally pushing for more and more types of data (When is speech-to-text good enough that we can get podcasts and video content into our index? Should we add Twitter? And on and on…)
• Analyzing the data we receive so that we can improve the quality of the data and the meta-data we generate from html documents or other sources.
• Expanding into a web crawl — creating directed search crawler operations for structure extraction (content and metadata) from the web

We are looking for talented and energetic software engineers or analysts with experience in:

• Building and managing crawlers
• Creative ways of acquiring data from APIs
• Acquiring, storing, and making available large amounts of unstructured data
• Parsing and analyzing html structure
• Managing commercial and open source data providers
• Java programming in distributed systems

Skills that will help you in this position are:

• Java programming
• A solid knowledge of Solaris or Linux
• Scripting tools to process large amounts of text (perl, etc.)

We hope you have a passion for working with data and want to do something cool with it (other than sell advertising). We will give you:

• Hard problems that require you to learn quickly and take ownership
• A chance to work with world-class engineers and mathematicians building a product that changes everything
• Freedom to do things the right way

If you choose to accept this mission, please:

• Submit a cover letter and resume in plain text, HTML, or PDF.
• Distinguish yourself from others by giving us your top 3 dumbest crawler mistakes you’ve made or you’ve seen made in your career. (We like people who try things and see how they work, learn from mistakes, then try again and again and again.)