Ask HN: Where are the interesting jobs?

Sounds like you are sick of other people's ideas.

The Kaiser Permanente Medical Informatics team is looking for more software engineers. You will get to do more than code monkeying, though admittedly, there is always some time spent code monkeying. You will get to help improve our natural language processing pipeline to wrangle large clinical datasets (How can we do phrase chunking in a parallel manner? Can we get down to real time, sub-second, speeds?). Help improve our internal tools to assist our physicians and linguistic annotators. Can you use statistical analysis or machine learning to "recommend" other diagnoses? Or, my own personal curiosity, sparked recently in office: can we reprogram an FPGA to be optimized for pattern recognition computations?

If these kinds of things excite you, please send me an email at Theodore.X.Lee@kp.org. We're based in beautiful Del Mar, CA, btw.

Cheers

What I used to do was to browse the companies funded by leading venture capital firms like KPCB[1]. These companies tend to do non-trivial stuff.

[1] http://www.kpcb.com/companies

Maybe start hunting in different industries? I did a bunch of the regular ol' ecommerce shops, selling stupid shit to people with too much money, before landing jobs in the education and healthcare fields and I have to say I am much happier now.

We're gonna have some job listings up come February.

Might be a tough sell for a lot of the folks here. We're not in the valley; we're in a small Florida city called Pensacola. And we're not slinging web apps. And we don't use super-sexy languages, we use Java. We're working on software for humanoid robots.

I work at the IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). We just came in 2nd place in the DARPA Robotics Challenge after SCHAFT, so we're moving forward with decent funding and we have a Boston Dynamics/Google Atlas robot that we used in the competition.

We don't suffer from a lot of the poor project management that is endemic to pure academics; we have a pretty healthy "Agile" culture, so much so that Atlassian is actually an official engineering partner on our team and occasionally sends engineers on-site to work with us both with their products and contributing code to the 'bot itself. Our team is very international (French, Dutch, Taiwanese, Spanish, American, Canadian, and if you count the Atlassian folks then we have an Aussie) and Pensacola is actually a pretty cool town. Plus it's on the beach. If you're interested, take a look at http://robots.ihmc.us/jobs come February.

EDIT

I foolishly posted this right as I'm about to go to bed, so I won't be checking in on comment replies. If anybody has questions, contact info is in my profile.

What is your background? Do you have a particular development area or industry that you are interested in (web development, scientific computing, etc)?

Government agencies (NASA, DOE, etc) and related industries (aerospace, defense, healthcare, etc) work on some very interesting and unique problems. But these jobs are generally more limiting (think legacy languages), often come with their own sets of cultural overhead (sometimes the antithesis of agile), and will likely pay less than what you are used to (if coming from SV). The trade-offs are tricky.

Not sure if you're more interested in spending time working on an open source project and getting paid to do it? We are looking to hire in 2014: http://ionicframework.com/

I'm also interested in this - I'm graduating in August with a Masters in CS, (degree in engineering), and all I can find are the likes of Google graduate program, (or other similar sized companies), rather than R&D-style positions...

Look at the conspicuous large corporations: Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, AMD, Amazon, Apple. Plenty of interesting jobs for engineers in this companies.

On the flip side, consider something like product management.

"Bad news: Unicorn jobs don't exist, at least not for long." - Philip Guo http://pgbovine.net/unicorn-jobs.htm

I feel it's pretty rare to work for a company that isn't about "push this out", check out The Monkey Inferno (http://bit.ly/monkeyinfernojobs).

I working started here about 5 months ago, it's pretty much a place where you can just run with an idea and you get to just be you.

email me if you have any questions: furqan@monkeyinferno.com

We're hiring across the board at Local Motors.

We run ideation, design and engineering challenges on our responsive Django/AngularJS based platform, and we are white labeling this platform at armycocreate.com (to develop soldier solutions) and at a location to be announced this spring (for a fortune 10 company).

Our core site at localmotors.com is based around automotive innovation -- we currently are manufacturing the Rally Fighter (rallyfighter.com), Verrado Drift Trike (verradodrifttrike.com) and the LM Racer (localmotors.com/racer) in our Microfactory network. We currently are headquartered in Phoenix, have a Microfactory in Las Vegas, and are expanding to the East Coast in the spring.

In the past we entered and won the Experimental Crowd Sourced Vehicle challenge hosted by DARPA in 2010 when we produced the XC2V in under 6 months time from design to delivering the vehicle to President Obama.

Our tech team is currently about 10 people deep ranging from server admin, db, UI/UX design and Python/JS Engineering roles. We currently only list a Front End position on our Jobs page but we're definitely interested in expanding our Tech Team, building some native iOS/Android apps.

This is much much more than a code factory... we're actually developing real products whose inception happens on the web platform. Our in-house knowledge is deep in design, engineering and manufacturing of physical products rooted in automotive -- but we certainly could use more help on the web side of things. We've got a great core on our tech team right now but we've had the hardest time finding talent in the Phoenix area.

If you've got the skillset and experience we're looking for, you'll have a huge amount of influence on the platform's direction, in addition to the opportunity to crank out some super cool features that solve real problems -- but you'll be able to choose your own destiny, which for me is almost more interesting than just one or the other option.

We're not totally against remote work but we'd prefer you to have a presence in one of our Microfactory locations, or at least have the ability to spend a significant amount of time (>30%) in Phoenix at our headquarters, at least for your onboarding period.

Please contact me directly @ wwilliams@localmotors.com if you are interested.

Not exactly what you were looking for, but if you take a look at https://github.com/bevacqua/frontend-job-listings, there's lots of job boards interesting companies (and then some) post their listings to.

https://github.com/bevacqua/frontend-job-listings

Mike at Standard Treasury here. We're hiring engineers to help us redefine the way companies integrate with their commercial banks. It sounds unsexy (at least compared to robotics mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but there's a massive opportunity in front of us to build APIs for banks. We're not cranking out features; we're selling a full developer experience and ecosystem. Let me know at mike@standardtreasury.com if you'd like to hear the rest of my sales pitch!

I see more boring jobs as an opportunity to polish your craft. Especially if you are more junior, like me, you can learn from coworkers, as well as on your own. Now if I can just get one :-).

Mozilla is looking for a compiler engineer who will work on LLVM, Emscripten, and Rust.

http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/o3VZWfwD

Check out mPATH.com - We're solving some hard problems in an interesting way, and we have customers knocking down our doors.

Big companies have big budgets for recruiting, which is why you'll see their ads everywhere.

Interesting jobs often rely on referrals. You might try attending some of your local developer events to see what is happening around you.

If there is any technology you are passionate about, you could try checking out conferences about it. You don't necessarily have to attend - just try checking out the list of sponsors / speakers. Companies that are involved with conferences tend to have more interesting jobs.

I posted this on the "Who's hiring" thread a few days ago, but didn't get much traction. Basically, if you are interested in science and/or energy, we're going to be doing a lot of really interesting things spanning physics simulations, system optimizations, and, yes, 'cranking out web application features'.

We're literally two people right now, but have a great product, and great traction. It's not a traditional VC style market or exit opportunity, but our opportunity/headcount ratio is absolutely massive, and we desperately need to hire.

=======

Folsom Labs, San Francisco CA, Full-time Software Engineer http://www.folsomlabs.com

We're building the next generation in solar (PV) system design tools; basically we make it very easy to analyze the potential value of a new PV systems by leveraging an advanced physics simulation engine. We've been in beta for about a year, and are formally calling it 1.0 in a few weeks. We've got a lot of great traction, and almost universally stellar feedback from our users. We've also recently received a federal grant[1] to help fund our next generation of products (and a round of hires).

Everyday we get to deal with a range of problems that few startups get to offer – we have a pretty modern web-stack [2] (that we actually need, not just to be trendy), but also get to solve interesting physics/optimization problems on a regular basis, while also acting as industry thought-leaders. It's a really unique place in both the solar industry, and as a software company.

We've made it this far as a two-man team, and we're poised for a lot of growth in the next year, so it's about time we brought on some help. If you're a full-stack engineer looking to do some really interesting work (and occasionally put your undergrad physics courses to real use), we'd love to hear from you.

– Paul

paul.gibbs@folsomlabs.com

[1] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/sunshot/incubator_projects....

[2] AngularJS (frontend), Python/Flask (API/Backend), Cython/C (Physics Simulation Engine)

*edit:reformatted the original "Who's Hiring" post

I'm an average programmer on my best days. Writing the same things over and over used to seem tedious, and boring. Day-in, day-out writing authentication backends, some boring object relationship mapped to an use object, Javascript to disable a button, a test to asset that a page is rendering correctly, etc. But then one thing happened. It took me less time to do each of those many "boring" things. Repetition was forcing me to think about the problem behind user authentication backends. About the most web-compliant way to disable a button. How to automate the work of writing the tests. Little by little. One by one. Line by line I started to become a better. Repetition is not bad. It is good. It forces you to think about the same problem from many different angles. That is why I'm more than happy writing yet another API in Django. And I will be happy in any field with any language. Its the process of growing and developing my skills that keeps me hooked.

If you feel like traveling, our Shanghai office is currently recruiting both FT and interns; http://wiredcraft.com/careers.html. We have an SF office with 2 FT staff and me traveling back and forth and are planning to open in Berlin this summer, but aren't yet recruiting tech profiles in the Bay.

Lots of Javascript (AngularJS, node.js), Go and Python. Lots of work on infrastructure, developer tools and data visualization. Projects are either our own products or for our clients (World Bank, UN...).

We have a flat structure and expect our team members to take direction and give a sh*t about what they do.

I think somethings being missed here. Interesting problems come out of the problems no one else is willing to solve or tackle because they're looking for something sexier.

The most interesting and random work of my life so far has come from never saying no, and instead a "let me think about it" and finding a way to get it done. This, in turn gets you a track record, and reputation for interesting conversations and problems.

Be a student of problems as a whole and the small boring problems you solve all become part of interesting solutions later.

Where are you located? I hear Matasano Security is a great place to work at. In fact, I sent Thomas an email earlier if there were openings for an internship. No response yet.

We're trying to make sure that Healthcare.gov never happens again.

dobt.co

Porn. No joke. Been working as a developer for tube and premium porn sites the past two years -- by far the best work experience I've ever had. Easy work environment, make my own schedule, low stress and high profitability. Worldwide travel with a bunch of partyers. Comfort may depend on your opinion of the industry, but the benefits are real.