Founded by the creator of the YOU DON'T KNOW JACK® game series, The Jellyvision Lab, Inc. creates virtual teachers, advisors, and salespeople who make online learning and decision making delightful.  In all that we do, our goal is to make complex topics simple and boring material interesting, using a combination of great design, unexpectedly funny content, and serious technology.

Of all the virtual people Jellyvision has created, the tallest and least afraid of bears is ALEX® (www.meetalex.com). ALEX helps companies talk their employees through the tricky choices they’ll have to make, like picking a health insurance plan, deciding how much to put in the 401(k), or whether they might want extra life insurance. Our customers love ALEX because he helps their employees figure out what’s best for their personal situations, which, in turn, saves our customers a boat-load of time and money - everybody wins!  As we sell more and more of ALEX, we need more and more non-virtual (i.e., real life) people to keep the virtual ones amazing. That’s where you come in.  

That’s lovely, but what’s the job?

Jellyvision is looking for a business savvy and process-minded tech leader who can help us marry our tech and business plans, make key architectural and infrastructure decisions, and help us think through long view tech and product growth ideas all the while helping to grow and guide our engineering department as we scale our ALEX platform. We’ve got a phenomenal group of engineers (a few dozen strong) already on board, but we’ve grown at a tremendous pace over the past year and need a strong leader and manager who can integrate and unify tech (and non-tech) teams devoted to different areas of the business and product, and help us grow smart.  Reporting directly to the CEO, the CTO will be a member of the senior leadership team with the ability to significantly impact the company and the future of a next generation product in the healthcare and fintech spaces.  Specifically, we need someone to:

• Be the tech voice at the highest levels of business and product planning; sharing info on tech feasibility, difficulty, staffing, process, etc., to guide decision making as we scale. (At heart, our CEO is a marketer, you’ll be a tech counterpart at the senior leadership table.)
  
• Own long term tech roadmapping and be the final arbiter for high level tech decisions – architectural, best practices, testing/QA, build or buy decisions – as well as the high level tech budget owner who makes sure we’re investing wisely in tech resources.
  
• Help us grow our engineering team, and help our developers grow individually. We need a talent magnet, someone with experience scaling engineering teams who’s interested in recruiting amazing and diverse tech talent and retaining them through active career-mapping, training, mentoring, appropriate performance and compensation review, and promotion planning.
  
• Be the public face of Jellyvision Tech. You are a passionate and articulate public speaker who enjoys networking and evangelizing on Jellyvision’s behalf, as well as identifying, wooing, and hiring great new talent; talking about how we’re innovating; forming relationships with peer organizations; mentoring those with less experience; etc. It’s also important to Jellyvision and its engineers that we give back to the Chicago tech/startup community that’s been so good to us.
  

What’s under the hood at Jellyvision?

We’re a tech organization that has been around for over a decade and we’ve moved from doing predominantly agency work to predominantly product work. As such, our stack is pretty eclectic right now. Here’s a little taster of the players in our current stable:

Ruby using Rails & Grape; React; Angular; Python; PHP; Many AWS systems (EC2, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, SQS, ElastiCache); Jenkins; nginx & Apache; MySQL & Postgres; CouchDB & MongoDB; Flash; AS3; Git; JIRA 

The advantages of all of this exposure are that we’re both good at figuring out what works, and we’ve got a really good idea of what works well. We’d look to you for a balanced perspective on the benefits of standardizations vs. the cost of calcification when it comes to choosing the right technologies. We have smart, experienced engineers and we want to hire more. A successful CTO knows to rely on their engineers to make the right recommendations on a tech basis – you just need to make sure the non-technical elements are being considered too.

What are you looking for in a CTO?

You should be a brilliant, humble, hard-working, amazing tech/business guru.  You know, someone who:

• Thinks about tech in business terms, and business in tech terms.  You’re the kind of person who can’t make a tech decision without considering the business implications, or a business decision without thinking of the tech implications.
  
• Has experience in a SaaS product company. You need to be the kind of person who understands (and cares about) who’s using (and paying for) the products you’re building. ALEX is an interesting B2B2C kind of product, so we’re not too hung up on whether your experience is in the B2B or B2C.
  
• Has experience with scale. We are in the throes of some serious growth and need to learn from someone who’s been here before and come out successfully on the other side.  We’re way past our start-up phase. You’re someone who’s lead large teams through significant growth through best practices, tools, org structures, process ideas, etc. You will help us to grow our business exponentially, without making anyone’s life miserable.
  
• Likes math and uses data to make decisions. You’re someone with a history of using data to drive business decisions. We’re not burning VC money to run our business but rather investing dollars that we’ve earned, so being judicious and balanced in our investments and choices, measuring short and long term implications, matters.
  
• Is a true mentor and coach. Our current team is amazing – and they’re not just great at coding, they’re incredible people to boot.  We want to grow and challenge them, while also providing an interesting and manageable workload.  You know how to ask the right questions to lead developers and managers to solutions that are elegant, scalable, and exciting.
  
• Is kind, honest, and humble. If we aren’t honest about where we’re failing, we can’t grow.  But if we can’t be kind while being honest, we won’t thrive.  And we really want to do both at the same time. We believe that humility is one of the keys to great leadership.  So massive egos need not apply; it’s just not going to be a good fit. 
  
• Is an excellent communicator. In writing and in person – for both internal and external audiences.
  

Anything Else?

Yes. We share a commitment to excellence and a desire to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere, so we only hire nice, bright, funny people who are willing to work hard.  Our credo is a simple one: be helpful. And we think we can be most helpful if our workforce is as diverse in thought, perspective, and culture as the people who use our products. We are looking to add amazing folks to our team who will bring diversity across many lines, including race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity, sex, and country of origin.

Are there any perks? Yes, we love perks.

• Competitive pay, 401(k) with matching, stock options and benefits.  We pay 100% of the cost of premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for our employees (as long as you qualify for our tobacco-free discount; if you’re a tobacco user, your medical premiums will be higher than $0). We also cover a really nice chunk of the cost of premiums for spouse/partner/dependent medical, dental and vision insurance.
  
• Casual dress and a flexible schedule. Come in a sweatshirt, jeans, whatever, like everyone else here.
  
• Creative work environment. We are lucky to work in a place that is full of intelligent, talented and innovative folks. Although most hours the place is deathly quiet (we're a focused bunch), this is punctuated with hilarious outbursts and general merriment, which makes a nice way to spend the day.
  
• Free food. Every week, we stock our kitchen with free healthy snack foods, and we have a catered lunch once a week to give people a reason to hang out and eat together.
  
• Easy transportation. We’re really close to the 'L' and the Halsted (#8) bus (right by the Apple Store and Mega Whole Foods too), and we have a transit FSA that allows you to dedicate pre-tax dollars to public transportation expenses. And a number of our employees like to bike to work, so we also have showers and lockers in the office.
  
• Did we mention our yoga class? We bring a pro instructor right to the office. Fully subsidized by Jellyvision and fully optional, btw.
  
• Oh! And we have a massage chair. Not just any massage chair, my friend. It’s the HumanTouch HT 5320 WholeBody™ Massage Chair. Feeling a little stiff? Sit down. Relax. Feel better? Good. Okay, back to work. 
  

And how do I apply?

We look forward to hearing about you and what you do. Make sure your application includes:

• A cover letter that highlights 3 reasons you think you’d be great for the gig. Writing is key to all we do, and we weigh cover letters heavily – especially for a senior leadership role like this.
  
• Your resume  
  

You will receive an auto-reply confirming that we've received your application.

Thanks for your interest in Jellyvision!