Software Engineer - Web Services | AppNexus Inc. | Portland, United States

Software Engineer - Web Services | AppNexus Inc. | Portland, United States

Software Engineer - Web Services (Portland) Engineering | Portland, United States

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The AppNexus web services team develops and maintains the RESTful API that allows our clients to programmatically manage their online advertisement business and receive billing and performance analytics from our platform. API services are consumed both internally and externally. We enable our UI engineers to build feature-rich web application / back office / auditing tools without making a single database connection, while enabling our clients to build their custom UI and perform real time integrations with other platforms. 
 
The API controls and centralizes read / write access to the business objects encapsulated in our MySQL database: enforcing rate limits, validating user inputs, and structuring data for our ad serving applications to interpret and execute.  Our system must be flexible and powerful enough to handle all of those tasks with very high peak usage – executing over 9,000 HTTP requests per minute! The API also exposes terabytes of ad serving, analytics, and performance data, equipping our clients to better analyze and optimize their campaigns.
 
Consider some of the problems we tackle every day:
 
• Overcoming scale challenges: How do we maintain speed, availability, and reliability in the face of our growing client base and exponentially growing number of objects and relationships in our system?
• Core developments:
• Leveraging mature open source technologies (such as Sphinx, Memcached, Solr, and primarily the LAMP stack) to increase uptime and reduce latency.
• Building our own API framework that is light, powerful, and specifically optimized for our tasks.
• Removing potentially asynchronous tasks from the critical path to keep response times low.
• Implementing our own distributed caching system, to speed up responses while maintaining consistent data between our data centers.
• Agile development: Our product is broken into portfolio teams who manage our client feature requests using SCRUM techniques. The API team’s challenge is managing operations across portfolio teams while consistently building an API that is fast and reliable.
 
The most exciting part about working at AppNexus is the enormous potential for personal and professional growth. We operate in a short release cycle (multiple times per month) and still maintain 99.96% uptime. You will have code running in production within a couple of weeks, and after just a few months, you can own a component of a system. We simply have too many challenges to not trust developers with enormous responsibility. Join our team, and you have the opportunity to redefine an industry and your career.
 
Who we are looking for:
1. You want to be part of an organization with minimal bureaucracy, open communication, and clear communication path between your team and the CEO and CTO.
2. You love to develop you have a thorough understanding of web development with any of the following languages: PHP, Java, Python, Ruby.
3. You enjoy solving complicated problems in novel ways.
4. You are an independent thinker who is self-motivated and thrives in a fast-paced work environment.
 
What's in it for you:
1. Industry changing development – build relevant solutions to some of today’s most interesting technical challenges
2. Significant impact from your very first day thanks to our rapidly growing scale and agile engineering teams.
3. A comfortable and relaxed office environment surrounded by passionate, driven colleagues.
4. Regular access to industry events – AppNexus hosts many technical speakers and meet-ups, complete with free beer and pizza.
5. And of course, competitive compensation, relocation stipend and all visa costs covered (if needed).
6. And finally, because our CEO is an industry recognized developer in his own right, your contributions to the company are recognized and rewarded.
 
 
The Other Perks:
• Great Technology: Any computer of your choosing. Most of our team develop using retina displayed MacBook Pros, with multiple monitors for additional screen real estate.
• Free Food: Every office has fully stocked kitchens including healthy and tasty snacks, drinks, coffee and bagels, each morning. Family Lunch Fridays – AppNexus provides free lunch for the company every Friday.
• Career Development: Annual budget for conferences and continuing education of your choosing
• An Active Development Community: Participate in company sponsored Hackathons, Innovation days and events
• Speak, publish, and patent: Your groundbreaking work will help enhance the engineering brand at an emerging powerhouse technology company
 
To learn more about the API Team at AppNexus, check out:
Tech Blog: On RESTful API Standards – Just Be Cool 11 Rules for Practical API Development (part 1 of 2) (http://techblog.appnexus.com/2012/on-restful-api-standards-just-be-cool-11-rules-for-practical-api-development-part-1-of-2/)
 
Tech Blog: On RESTful API Standards – Just Be Cool 11 Rules for Practical API Development (part 2 of 2) http://techblog.appnexus.com/2012/on-restful-api-standards-just-be-cool-11-rules-for-practical-api-development-part-2-of-2/
 
Tech Blog: Project Hydra – Scaling an API Globally
(http://techblog.appnexus.com/2012/project-hydra-scaling-an-api-globally%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8/)
 
Tech Blog: Security Basics Part 1: Principle of Least Privilege
(http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/security-basics-part-1-principle-of-least-privilege/)
 
Tech Blog: How to use the PHP Reflection API to Modify Inaccessible Variables
(http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/how-to-use-the-php-reflection-api-to-modify-inaccessible-variables/)


http://appnexus.com/open-positions?jvi=ouVGYfwN