Lead Developer

To Apply: jobs@tastedmenu.com

Date Posted: Thursday March 11, 2010

Company: Tasted Menu

Location: Boston, MA

Company description

Tasted Menu is a stealth-mode start-up building an ambitious new consumer web and mobile offering in the online food space. Prominent and tangentially related properties in this realm include Chowhound, MenuPages, Urbanspoon, and Yelp. Further information will be shared with qualified candidates.

The company’s Founder and CEO is a Harvard Business School graduate with an extensive background in traditional and online media businesses, and venture financing. The company’s technical Advisor is the CTO of a prominent, venture-backed social network, and a computer science alumnus from MIT.

Position

If you are an ace programmer, database guru, social media junkie, and passionate foodie, this might be your dream job. Tasted Menu is seeking a Lead Developer, reporting to the CEO, who will be responsible for heading up our development efforts. This individual will…

• Work closely with the CEO and technical Advisor to define the product roadmap.
• Execute on this roadmap in an accurate, expeditious, and hands-on fashion while establishing a scalable development methodology for future growth.
• Oversee the architecture and operations of the website, and manage the internal IT support function.
• Drive the recruiting of technical talent in building a best-in-class engineering team.
• As a key founding member of the management team, make valuable contributions to business discussions around the company’s short-term operations and long-term strategy.

Candidates should have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline; strong, pragmatic, and highly hands-on technical development skills; a keen intellect, innovative problem solving skills, and a technology agnostic mentality with the ability to consider and implement a broad array of solutions; an attuned aesthetic sensibility and an overriding appreciation for exceptional user experience as the ultimate goal of all design and development efforts; strong communication and people leadership skills alongside a passion for creating fun, high-performance company cultures; and a strong entrepreneurial nature rooted in prior experience launching companies, services, and/or technologies, including a familiarity with the dedication, focus, resilience, and sense of humor vital to launching a successful venture.

Specifically, our ideal candidate will possess a proven background of both web-application development and production deployment, including structuring robust database schemas and designing effective administrative back-ends with varied roles and permissions. A candidate will also show deep experience with modern web-frameworks and the ability to leverage them to build our dynamic, feature-rich, algorithm-driven social recommendation platform. Absolutely essential to constructing this platform will be deep technical abilities in both the social (profiles, friending, messaging, events, outbound broadcasting, photo sharing and display, etc.) and recommendation (browsing and search, ratings and reviews, contributor status and recognition, ranking/sorting/filtering, etc.) elements of social recommendation. Experience with overlaying targeted advertising models on top of such platforms and an understanding of the requirements to translate all of the above to a mobile application are also highly relevant.

Timing and compensation

The company, which is currently self-funded, will be initiating seed capital fundraising in early 2010 and intends to have an individual fully and formally committed to the Lead Developer position in advance of engaging in serious discussions with investors. While limited moonlighting work and participation in final-stage investor meetings may occasionally be requested during the fundraising process, the Lead Developer will not be expected to join the venture full-time until financing is secured (the target for which is the spring of 2010). As such, the Lead Developer will be shielded from the initial "financing risk" inherent to start-up ventures.

Upon joining the company full-time in Boston, the Lead Developer will receive compensation commensurate with early stage emerging growth companies, including meaningful equity participation, competitive cash compensation, and health benefits. In addition, with almost daily company-sponsored meals ordered from or at an endless variety of restaurants around Boston, this will not be your typical ramen noodle start-up.

Next steps

Please submit your résumé to jobs@tastedmenu.com. If helpful in addressing any relevant qualifications not highlighted in the résumé – e.g. active involvement in social recommendation and particularly online food communities, passion for dining and/or cooking, amateur photography experience, etc. – candidates should feel free to also include a cover letter. An introductory call will be scheduled with qualified candidates, after which significantly more information about the venture will be revealed.