iCrossing is hiring a Java developer in Chicago

My employer, iCrossing, has opened a search for a new member for the Merchantize team. Here's the description. To apply for the position, visit http://www.iCrossing.com/careers, select U.S. Career Offerings, Jobs by Location, then Jobs in Chicago, IL.

Java Software Engineer (Open Source / Web Analytics / ETL)

JOB DESCRIPTION

We’re a people business.

People are the heart and soul of our company, working every day to make our clients’ marketing programs successful.

At iCrossing, we combine experienced talent with world-class technologies to efficiently create marketing programs that truly perform. With more than 620 professionals in 15 offices in the U.S. and Europe, we are equipped to service the digital marketing needs of large enterprises and growing companies alike.

We’re seeking the talented, the experienced and the exceptional to give our clients the most creative and successful solutions for an ever-changing industry. When we find them, we offer a dynamic working environment, competitive compensation, the opportunity to work on exciting client programs, and occasional bagels.
We are seeking a highly motivated and technically proficient JEE Software Engineer / Software Developer to work on our industry leading and mission critical Paid Media Management (Search Engine Marketing, bid management) product.



Features of the position:
• Work on a high-visibility, high performance product that supports iCrossing’s industry leading SEM practice in a growing and fast moving industry.
• Work closely with all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL) and their APIs.
• Work in a fast moving and forward thinking development environment that is constantly researching and rapidly implementing the latest technologies.
• Research and participate in the advancement and implementation of open source frameworks and architectures such as SOA/ESB, MapReduce, Grid and Cloud computing, and others.
• Work with an experienced Agile Software Development team in a highly collaborative environment.
• Modern Java Enterprise open source based product stack, Java 6, Spring, Hibernate 3, Webworks/Struts 2, JMS, JUnit, MySQL and more.
• Learn current software development best practices (continuous integration, build automation, test driven development, pair programming, agile estimating and planning, etc)
• Apple MacBook Pro, 24” widescreen monitor, IntelliJ or Eclipse.
• A casual, fun, and creative work environment
Major Job Responsibilities / Accountabilities:
• Write test driven quality code.
• Work closely with your dev team.
• Follow and encourage development best practices.
• Develop knowledge of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) principles and techniques.

Skills/Requirements:
Required Technologies (At least one or more of the following)
• Spring
• Hibernate
• SQL scripts
• Shell Scripting
• Webwork (Struts 2.0)
• Linux / Unix admin
• Junit (required) or TDD (preferred)
• Grid Computing (GridGain preferred)

Bonus Technologies (Preferred any of these)
• MySQL (especially advanced knowledge of replication, storage engines, backup and recovery)
• PERL
• Data warehousing design concepts, ETL
• Mondrian OLTP
• JMS
• Amazon EC2 / S3 / AWS

Knowledge / Skills / Abilities:
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent level of experience
• Understanding and/or appreciation for Agile software development methodologies.
• 1+ yrs of professional development experience.
• Familiarity with source control using Subversion
• Familiarity with IDE tools such as Eclipse or IntelliJ
• Must possess effective interpersonal and communication skills and ability to work successfully in a team environment.
• Good organizational and time-management skills.

Do Not Apply if you:
• Do not know Java
• Have no interest in Agile, TDD or Unit testing
• Are close-minded and don’t want to learn new technologies.
• Are more comfortable working on the same technology you did last year.

*ICROSSING IS NOT ACCEPTING RESUMES FROM STAFFING AGENCY PARTNERS AT THIS TIME. THANK YOU.

CloudCamp Chicago meeting Oct 21, 2008

Last Tuesday (Oct 21, 2008) was the Cloud Computing one-night conference "CloudCamp" hosted by Tech Cocktail. My company has some really time consuming web analytics tasks that take days to run, and we're exploring using GridGain to distribute the work over several servers, so it was a good chance for me to get an acquaintance with this field.

I've included a few photos from the event, that come from the conference's Flickr photogallery.

The meeting was alright. I didn't see anyone I knew there but had reasonably enjoyable small talk with mostly non-technical people during the drinking hour.

It wasn't a conference in any traditional sense of the word. There were no scheduled topic, no scheduled speakers. They did use the format used by O'reilly's "Foo Camps". They have a grid of sessions and meeting rooms on a whiteboard. All the squares are empty. Then they ask everybody who has a topic they are interested in to write it in a square on the board. Presto...you are now the moderator of that session.

I volunteered the topic "Software Engineering and Grid Computing". Eight really smart people showed up, including two physicists from Italy, two doctoral students, a guy from UBS, and a consultant from CohesiveFT, a Chicago company specializing in cloud computing.

Physics people have been doing grid computing for years, so they were levels above me. But interestingly, a lot of their problems have to do with resource sharing. There can be other research teams that also want to use the grid, and maybe they don't want the nodes installed with the same software you do, and the people with the biggest grants tend to win out.

The most interesting guy there was the consultant from CohesiveFT, Pat Kerpan. He had two pieces of memorable wisdom. (1) Rule of thumb: count on a 30% performance penalty imposed from the overhead of grid enabling your problem. (2) It's easier to bring the computing to the data than to bring the data to the computing.

He talked about the stuff their company uses for their clients called "Open Source Sun Hypervisor". This has an interface that allows you to trick out your nodes with whatever setup you want (e.g. pick and choose between java, tomcat, flavors of linux, struts, etc.) and get a multinode environment all set up in six minutes.

Several of the people spoke knowingly of "paravirtualization". Pat distinguished between problems that are "compute bound" vs. "data bound".

A few people referred to Hadoop. No one had ever heard of GridGain, but I don't think that Java development was strongly represented in that collection of people.

People have different aims in cloud computing. For a lot of people, they don't mind if a lot of virtual nodes are spread over one machine.

Virtualization was recommended as a convention even when you are doing one node per machine.

In many commercial applications, 4 virtual nodes per machine is typical.

Many people responded to my description of what we are trying to do at iCrossing with "why don't you just use Amazon's cloud computing"? To hear them describe it, Amazon gives you the flexibility to do whatever you want.

I could have attended some of the other sessions if I wanted to stay two more hours, but I split after mine. The other sessions were on pretty soft- or business-focussed topics. One guy led a session called “What color is your cloud?” There were two Microsoft people who found each other and made their own Microsoft-focussed session ("Cloud Computing in Windows 8 and SQL Server").