The Company

Retrofit (www.retrofitme.com) is a Chicago-based startup that is doing some actual good for the world.  We are tackling one of the biggest health problems effectingthe United States and much of the rest of the world:  unhealthy weight and obesity.  In the US today, over 68% of adults are overweight and over 35% are obese.  A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) predicts that 75 percent of Americans will be considered overweight or obese by the 2020 (the highest rate of any country surveyed).  The medical costs/implications of this epidemic are staggering - by some reports over $150 billion a year.

We are not just another diet or weight-loss company.  Retrofit is science-based, data-driven and outcome-focused.  Our protocol was guided by our impressive advisory board which is comprised of leading experts in weight loss, nutrition and exercise.  There is enormous interest in the health and wellness space.  There is no shortage of investor interest in us - we recently closed our Series B VC round, raising $5 million.

Retrofit is growing and are looking for good people.  If you want to join in the fight against obesity and work on cool technology at the same time, Retrofit is the place for you.

The Team

Retrofit's engineering team is small, highly accomplished and geographically distributed.  We live in Chicago, San Francisco and Cleveland.  Most of the time we work from home and collaborate over email, Jira, HipChat, iChat and Skype.  Chicago-area team members work from the office on Wednesdays.  Our remote team travels to the home office in Chicago, Illinois every six weeks or so for design meetings, beer and fun.

In order to join the team, you must have experience working remotely with a distributed team.  You must be productive when working from home (even if you have distractions like playful dogs or goldfish).  You must have passion for software development, abhor code duplication and embrace test driven development.

The Development Environment<span

For a startup, we have a very robust development environment.  In fact, the first thing we did before writing any code was install Confluence, Jira, Bamboo and Fisheye/Crucible.  Our development process is best described as rapidly iterative with frequent releases to production (often multiple times in a week).  We believe in always keeping the tree in a releasable state.  We are actually agile in the true sense of the word.

For those familiar with the Joel Test, we score an 11 out of 12.

The tools we use:

• Git<span
• IntelliJ<span
• Atlassian suite (Confluence, Jira/Bonfire, Bamboo, Fisheye/Crucible)
• Maven and JUnit

Our stack looks like:

• Client-side:  95% Javascript built on JQuery/Backbone.js communicating with the server using web services.  Underlying page infrastructure via Wicket.
• Server-side:  Scala (with a smattering of Java)
• Data:  Mongo (NoSQL)
• App Server:  Jetty (dev) and Tomcat (prod)
• Open Source Libraries:  Spring, Joda, Apache Commons, Args4J, Jackson, Scribe, EasyMock (to name a few of our favorites)
• Development:  Mac
• Production:  Linux (CentOS)

Details on our applications:

• Client management - tools our employees and Wellness Team uses to manage their clients, view their data and keep them on track
• Client dashboard - tools our Clients use to help them on their journey to better health
• Browsers - we support IE7 and higher, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (including iOS devices)
• Mobile - PhoneGap builds of our mobile-web application for iOS and Android

The Work

We are focus on two major things

• Ensuring successful outcomes for our clients 
• Making our Wellness Expert team's as efficient and scalable as possible

We are a small team and we tend to contribute in one way or another to all the major projects we undertake.   What keeps things interesting is the variety of things we get to work on.  We try to utilize the best thinking in open source and API partners in order to develop solutions to meet the above needs.  We are looking for you to join us and build more great stuff.

The Job

We have an open position focused on Quality Assurance for our applications and public website.    

Specific skills we hope to get include:

• Automation mindset - you dread mind-numbing repetitive testing and have the skill and ability to automate tests 
• Test planner - You have favorite tools for building test plans.  It is important to you to document expected behavior
• Modern Javascript experience - You understand how modern Javascript applications are built and can test them.  You are familiar with the tools and techniques used to diagnose issues (e.g., when you find a bug in a web service, you can get details for the engineering team)
• Automation tools - you have experience with the best (and ideally free/open-source) automation tools and can get them running effectively (we currently use the Robot Framework)
• Java language - We use Scala, which is the new hotness, but it is still a JVM language.  Experience with Java-based applications is important (you know what a stack trace is)
• Cross browser testing experience - you know which browsers are a real pain and need extra love
• Mobile testing experience - from iOS to Android, you know how to test mobile web applications
• Bonus points for native iOS testing experience
• Javascript experience (bonus points for JQuery knowledge)
• It goes with out saying - the command line is your friend and you know what source code control is
• Willingness to learn a new environment and tools
• Strong communication skills and ability to work with a remote team
• Technically savvy and intellectually curious

Here are some of the things you might have worked in the last few months or may work in the future

• Verifying all the complexities of our B2B pricing engine
• Adding to our automated regression test suite
• Testing new refresh logic in our mobile app

While you will be working from home the majority of the time, you must be able to travel to our offices in Chicago any day of the week.  Thus, we are only interviewing Chicago-area candidates.

Interested?

If you want to join a great group of people in the fight against obesity, submit your resume and cover letter.

In your cover letter, please provide the following information: 

• What does automated testing mean to you?