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. 

Talkshow is an in-house application that our production team uses to create the interactive conversations that we’re known for. We have a small but mighty team who are responsible for making sure that Talkshow is everything we need it to be.

It’s a Java application built on the Eclipse platform with a variety of third-party and home-grown libraries folded into the mix.

Working on Talkshow is a great opportunity to do application development with incredible access to your user base (and to have a user base that is 100% populated by lovely, lovely people).

Here’s where things get interesting: strategically, we’re unlikely to stay on a Java platform long term; within a few years, we’re likely to move to a platform that the majority of our non-Talkshow engineers know. Thus, this is an excellent opportunity for a Java engineer who is looking to move away from Java in the next few years. You’ll be supported, nay, expected, to develop your skills beyond Java, while keeping Talkshow running well.

We’re committed to this direction, and we’re going to be looking for engineers who are too. 

GREAT, SO WHAT SKILLS SHOULD I HAVE?

It seems redundant to list Java as a required skill, but here we are. We’re looking for engineers with established experience with Java. We use RCP, JFace and SWT (although we’ve been exploring HTML for UI development recently). If you have experience with these frameworks, that’s great, but we’re open to experience Java engineers who can talk intelligently about their approach to learning new frameworks.

One of the biggest aspects of this job is that you’re dealing with an application that has been developed over many many years by different engineers. The older code is complicated and poorly documented (lately we’ve been doing a good job of keeping designs simple and documenting them). Most of the designs are well thought out, but don’t necessarily lend themselves to grokking without substantial thought. You definitely need to be willing to get your hands dirty with old code, but we very much embrace an attitude of incremental improvement and the judicious application of refactoring and refinement.

You will be expected to be an experienced writer of unit tests. We use JUnit at Jellyvision, but if you’ve used other frameworks, that’s not such a big deal. However, you need to be comfortable with and committed to writing well tested code.

Our application wrangles a lot of XML and uses JDOM to do so. Knowledge of XML is important, but our use of JDOM is not overly complex, so if you haven’t used that, don’t worry.

You’ll need to do some data design and need decent SQL skills in order to implement those designs; we’ll definitely be looking for engineers with more than a passing understanding of DB design and implementation.

We’re looking for engineers at Jellyvision, not coders. You should be able to demonstrate discipline as an engineer and have a desire to continue to get better at how you write code as well as what you’re writing.

Since you’re creating a tool for users who are non-technical, an ability to communicate effectively with audiences with a wide range of technical ability and experience is essential.

Finally, we’re looking for someone with a fundamental desire to grow as an engineer, and the flexibility to re-experience what it’s like to be a newbie as you pick up new languages and tools as you transition from Java engineer to something new! 

NICE TO HAVES…

The tools of the trade for this job are Git, Maven and Jenkins. Experience with these tools is definitely a boon. Experience with similar tools would be necessary at the very least. If you’re not using any build tools already, then this position might be a bit overwhelming!

Some of our critical third party libraries are Flash and Lucene. Flash is one of our application’s output formats (the interactive conversations can be rendered as Flash movies). Lucene is used for facilitating search features over our users’ conversations. It’s also part of the product that we’re looking to beef up. If you have experience with Lucene, that would be very helpful, but if not, it’s definitely something you can learn when you work here. 

Experience with Agile development process will be handy. We’re working on shifting towards Scrum and Kanban across the company and we’re certainly getting there. Having new engineers with experience in Agile techniques will certainly help, but if you’re new to Agile, then you can learn along with us!

Looking to the future, we’re using Ruby on the backend and frameworks like Angular and React on the front end. As an engineering department, we’re making forays into functional programming (exploring Clojure and Scala) as well as NodeJS as a viable server platform. If you’ve played with these (and you like them), then we’re moving in the same direction.
  
ANYTHING ELSE?

Yes.  As we mentioned above, we only hire nice, bright, funny people who are willing to work hard.  Jellyvision is a group effort and you must be capable of working collaboratively with internal and external people alike.  Everyone at Jellyvision shares a commitment to excellence and a desire to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere.

ARE THERE ANY PERKS? Yes, we love perks.

·         Competitive pay, stock options and benefits. 401(k) with matching. And 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. 

Interested?

Great! We look forward to hearing a little more 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.

·         Your resume  

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

If you decide to apply, please know that every complete application will be carefully reviewed. Seriously! We know it is a time commitment to prepare an application. And we respect that effort by thoughtfully reviewing every complete application and responding one way or the other. But that kind of thoughtful review means that it sometimes takes us awhile to get back to applicants, so please NO PHONE CALLS. The time we spend responding to phone calls and emails inquiring about where we are in the process is time that we could be spending actually moving the process along – so please be patient with us!