DATA ENGINEER

At Sortable data drives everything. We’re managing large sets of data about products and services such as cameras, cars, movies and restaurants. Your role at Sortable will be to lead our efforts in extracting structured information from datasets that can be used to help consumers make personal decisions without having to do all the research themselves. To achieve this you’ll work in areas such as natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval etc. You’ll need to be equally comfortable doing incremental quality and also building brand new systems to enable future improvements. Although you will work on cutting-edge problems, this position is not a research position.

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What we’re looking for

You’re a highly productive coder, self-motivated and able to learn new skills quickly
You’re hungry, ambitious, independent, curious and driven
Ability to take responsibility and release features users love that drive our vision forward
Top-notch communication skills – we’re a small team, you’ll need to fit in well
Bonus: Worked at a startup before, active in open source, personal projects, active blog, Linux experience, spending way too much time researching which product to buy

Skills

Skills: Natural language processing, machine learning, information retrieval
Open source toolkits such as: NLTK, LingPipe, Mallet, StanfordNLP and OpenNLP
Experience with Scala, Java or C#
Backend development: databases, algorithms, performance, threading

Why Sortable

We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, equity in the company, and kick ass developer machines. If you’re interested in building the future of how people make purchase decisions with a group of nice, funny, smart people, then Sortable is the place for you.

OTHER OPENINGS

Technology

tech

We use Scala for most of our development. In addition, we have written tools or services in Python, Bash, and Java. We want our team of developers to have fun and be productive, so we’ll expect you to bring your own ideas and suggestions as to what hardware and software should be used.
Other tools and services we use include: Lift, PostgreSQL, Redis, Mercurial, Jenkins, Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3) and Ubuntu.

CODING CHALLENGE

If you want to really impress us we’ve devised a coding challenge. It will give you an example of the types of problems we work on at Sortable. Completing the coding challenge and sending your solution along with your resume to challenge@sortable.com is the best way to show us how much you love programming.

THE COMPANY

WHERE IS SORTABLE LOCATED?

We’re in Waterloo, in the Bauer Building, just south of UpTown Waterloo.

WHAT’S NEARBY?

Just downstairs in our building there are some great places to eat including Vincenzo’s (gourmet sandwich bar, hot plate counter, sushi and more), the Bauer Kitchen (a great restaurant), and the Bauer Bakery (quick food to go). If you feel like a short stroll, UpTown Waterloo is just down the street, where there are tons of great bars, restaurants, and stores. Also, the city bus stops right outside our new building!

Our mission at Sortable is to make it easy for people to make decisions about which product or service to use, for example their next camera, phone, or tv purchase, or their next meal, movie, or trip. Sortable’s focus is making these decisions easy for ordinary people by handling all the data analysis and surfacing the best options in simple, beautiful interfaces. Sortable is a 10+ person engineering driven startup, our fast growing websites are used by millions of visitors each month, and we need to expand!

“I came to Sortable to solve challenging and exciting problems.”

Aaron Levin

Perks

Sortable perks include the candy mountain, lunches during crunch time, drinks, an arcade, video games, guitar room, quarterly hackathons, social events (gokarting, board games), health benefits, and flexible hours.