Hiring a front-end developer for open-source projects

First off, this vacancy is currently invite-only as we're first trying to find candidates through our own network.

We don't have many policies, but we've published some thoughts about hiring over at /jobs/. This explains some choices that we make and could help you figure out if we're a cultural match.

If you don't know Transloadit yet, here's a bit about our company.

Transloadit

Transloadit is a file uploading & encoding service. Launched by 3 developers who met through open source in 2009, customers have been loving our clever API and top-notch support ever since.

We're the company that has been running Node.js in production the longest. As such we had to invent a few wheels - that we shared with the world. Most notably: node-mysql, node-formidable, and node-retry. These are modules that are now industry standards for dealing with MySQL, file uploads, and networked/unreliable systems. We have also contributed to Node.js itself a lot.

Our latest open source project is 'tus'. tus is our most ambitious open source project yet: its goal is to change how the world does file uploading. tus is an open standard for resumable file uploads that has been started by Transloadit, and collaborated on by employees at Google, Yahoo, the director of engineering at Vimeo, an author of HTTP/1.1, and the creator of ZeroMQ. We're writing implementations of this protocol for all popular languages, so that developers around the globe can add drop-in self-hosted reliable uploading to their projects. It's a layer on top of HTTP, so it's easy to reason about, inspect, extend, and deploy in existing projects and infra.

Vimeo has already announced they will be adopting tus for all their video uploading.

In many ways we owe our existence to open source. The founders met through it, our API relies heavily on open source tools, we meet potential employees through it, and it's how we get exposure for our service.

Since open source is critical to our existence, we invest heavily in it. We're currently doing that by:

• Open sourcing our juicy bits
• Sponsoring conferences & hackathons
• Giving away free conference tickets on Twitter every month
• Sharing our tech knowledge in articles
• Contributing back (cash, code, servers, and infra expertise) to the giants whose shoulders we're standing on, such as ImageMagick, Node.js, and tus.

Our open source projects and contributions so far have been back-end oriented, as is our team currently. We're now looking for someone who can help us make these projects delightful to use, and want to make a first full-time hire for a front-end developer, who'll mainly work on open source projects.

The Job

There are three main things (all open source) that we would like your help with.

• A brand new stand-alone JavaScript uploader for web-browsers. Based on tus, with an opt-in GUI for showing progress and offering integrations with Dropbox and others. It should work without the Transloadit back-end. Adding Transloadit adds encoding & storage capabilities without running your own servers. It should be a pleasure to use on mobile, too.
• tus itself. Polishing its static website, the tus-js-client, and any of its other sub-projects that interests you
• Craft new beautiful statically generated ".io" sites for other (to be announced) open source projects

In general we're looking for polished, well tested, carefully crafted products that are delightful to work with and use. So for this job it's not only important that you know JavaScript, but also how to make things look stunning and work well for end users.

At your disposal are time, focus, and the core team ready to provide feedback, guidance, and anything else you need.

We have some high-level ideas around all this, but nothing is set in stone and we'll be relying on your input heavily to give these projects a meaningful direction.

We'd like you to spend 90% of your time on this.

Other Jobs

The remaining 10%, we'd like you to spend on improving Transloadit itself. Team members pick items that intrigue them from an internal ideas-list. Here are a few actual examples from different disciplines:

• Create a beautiful statically generated site/page for Transloadify
• Convert our Node.js SDK from CoffeeScript to ES2015
• Add graphs for response times, queue times and error rates up on transloaditstatus.com
• Give our Meteor SDK some love
• Improve our English on tus.io pages and transloadit.com documentation
• Work on a standardization proposal for all Transloadit SDKs
• Create an OCR robot (image in, text out)
• Write blog post on working remote and a better balancing work/life
• Pick a more pleasant font for transloadit.com
• «your idea here»

More info in /jobs/

Pay

We can spend USD 8,000 a month on this full-time position. Read about why we're disclosing this in /jobs/.

It would be easiest if you could invoice us. We could sign long-term guarantees that give you job security. This way you get to keep most of this budget.

If you want, we can also put you on the payroll. That would be in Germany though, meaning half is lost on taxes/insurances and unless you are from Germany, too, we might have some additional legal hurdles to take. That said, we are happy to make this work if you so prefer.

Remote, off-time, behavior, and expectations

Our stances on these matters and can be found in /jobs/. In short: you can work from anywhere in the world. Our virtual office is powered by Slack. Take off-time as you see fit, also during "office hours", all we ask is that we know ahead of time. We seek people that are kind, resourceful, curious.

Stack

Here's our stack. The tech we'd like you to work with has a check mark, but feel free to venture into our other areas that intrigue you.

We require your workstation to run Linux or OSX/BSD. Reasons are outlined in /jobs/. Beyond this restriction - you're free to use any tool that you like. We'll arrange for any license that you require.

How to apply

As mentioned right at the beginning of this post, this vacancy is currently invite-only. So if you're still reading this, you are probably already talking to a founder.

If you are still here for other reasons, please know that if we don't succeed finding a suitable candidate through our network, we'll follow up here and on Twitter with more information on how to apply.