CTO and Technical Co-Founder

About us

Word of Mouth, Inc is an early-stage consumer web start-up that provides relevant and authenticated recommendations and reviews of local businesses and professionals.  We help our users efficiently find the services they need.

Our recommendation engine uses granular privacy controls and social authentication to cut through the problems of crowd-sourced data. We help businesses build and manage their reputations, and respectfully leverage their clients and partners for new business.

At our core, we capture and manage business intelligence and institutional knowledge, all in the context of your personal and professional networks.  Our service can be used by consumer, B2B2C, and enterprise users.  We’ve been described as “LinkedIn meets Yelp” and as a “private Yelp” or “Yelp for enterprise”.

We have a working prototype and are pre-traction.  The basics – incorporation (counsel is Wilson-Sonsini, DE corp), a small engineering team, pilot users, and advisors – are already in place.  We are now looking for the technical leadership and vision that will take our service to the next stage and beyond.

About You

You have industry experience, an advanced technical degree, can code with the best across multiple web technologies while balancing deadlines against developing bleeding edge technology.  You challenge the status quo.  You enjoy wearing many hats – from building and leading an engineering team, to rolling up your sleeves and coding.  You can deftly translate market and product requirements into engineering tasks, and have a deep appreciation for UX.

Most of all, you’re ready for the right opportunity and team to join as a co-founder, and build something great and exciting.

Role and Responsibilities

• Co-founder together with current CEO
• Contribute to product and technical vision
• Build, lead and mentor the engineering team, from architectural direction and design, to implementation
• Scope projects and milestones, and drive the team towards successful deliveries.
• Write code, totally hands-on
• Contribute to infrastructure and system improvements

Requirements

• Must be fluent in
  • Server side Java technologies and object-oriented design
  • Complex SQL implementation (preferably MySQL)
  • Client-side JavaScript (CSJS)
• Must have a strong understanding of
  • MVC frameworks (preferably Struts2)
  • HTML5
  • Server side software, scalability, performance and reliability aspects
  • Client-side AJAX web-development methods
• Must have proven hands-on experience building
  • Distributed internet-scale systems
  • Consumer facing search and data retrieval
  • High-performance, large-scale web sites and services
• Major plus if you have
  • Knowledge of a graph database such as Neo4j
  • Hands-on experience managing cloud-based servers (Apache Tomcat) or Amazon EC2
  • Mobile development experience for iOS and Android
• Good communication, organization and project management skills
• MS or higher in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Minimum 7+ years designing and building progressively more complicated software
• Eligible to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis.  No visa.

Send us your resume and a pointer to your LinkedIn profile.

Principals only.