Job Board

Tapulous was founded on the belief that the iPhone and the App Store represent a huge shift in mobile connectivity and that the next big technology wave will be all about mobile. We were the first Company built in this new space. To date we have successfully attracted 15 million unique users to our portfolio of applications headed by Tap Tap Revenge, a music rhythm game that is present on 1 in every 3 iPhones and iPod touches and that was the top downloaded game on the entire platform. The company is headed by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs, Apple veterans and backed by a high profile network of angel investors including the first investors in Google, Vinod Khosla, Marc Benioff and Jeff Clavier. The Company is profitable with less than 20 employees and working hard to built the biggest musical-based social gaming network on the iPhone and other next generation mobile devices.

Tapulous is looking to hire a world-class Senior Backend Engineer with experience building large-scale social networks and platforms, as well as the apps and services that run on them. Our business is expanding and we need a world-class Senior Backend Engineer to complement our team. You will take responsibility for building and maintaining our highly-scalable mobile social gaming platform, the backbone of Tapulous’ music-centric gaming network and broader family of iPhone applications. As we grow, you will help us to navigate the next series of scale challenges and will work closely with our iPhone client team to deliver compelling new features and products.

You will be joining a fun, hardworking, and highly motivated engineering team that prides itself on a scrappy, can-do attitude. We enjoy working on big new products and features, but also take pleasure in polishing and fixing bugs in existing software.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

• Participating in our weekly process, loosely based on Scrum methodology, which includes setting goals, working towards completing them, keeping the team apprised of your progress, and showing off what you’ve accomplished at week’s end
• Working on the server-side pieces of new features in our games and applications, which could include any number of cool things to do with location, social networks (ours and 3rd party networks like Twitter and Facebook), music, user generated content, RSS feeds & mailing lists, and personalized content like feeds, messages, avatars, etc.
• Proactively working to improve our overall architecture and to take advantage of new technology that enable us to do more, have it cost us less, and have our reliability continue to improve
• Rapidly addressing issues that crop up as we deploy new features, new hardware, or as our active user base continues to grow at a quick clip

Requirements:

• Several years experience as a backend engineer for a social consumer web site of significant scale. You will have either grown with that company from the beginning, or spent time learning from a larger team about what makes for an effectively scaleable operation
• Excited about working in a fast-moving, high-profile start-up. You’ll be writing code that will ship within weeks to millions of people. That means there are times where there are less predictable work hours, and problems that require more inventiveness to make up for somewhat fewer resources. If you have Macgyver-like tendencies, we’ll put them to good use
• Familiarity with a LAMP stack, even if you have most recently been working in other languages (Ruby, Python, LISP, Java, etc.), or on other platforms

Nice to have:

• Experience with MySQL tuning, software load balancing, memcached, and/or unit testing frameworks
• Familiarity with open APIs for social networks and identity (Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial, OpenID), as well as Amazon Web Services (EC2), Google AppEngine, or other cloud computing systems
• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

This job is based in our downtown Palo Alto office, which is 2 minutes walk from the Caltrain. We are surrounded by dozens of shops, restaurants, and bars. Our retail location means that fans drop in every day to say hi, sign our guest book and tell us what they’d like us to focus on next. For employees who commute via Caltrain, we provide 3G cards.

To apply, please send your resume to fadi@tapulous.com