Experienced Web Services Developer

iPlatform is a leading technology company in the social networking arena, the first development company to be recommended officially by Facebook outside America, and we have been building branded social campaigns for major blue chip clients and agencies for two years. In that time we’ve developed from a bootstrapped pair of two to a fast growing, profitable company.

We have a vision that conversation-based communication will become the crux of online marketing in the future, and we’re aiming to become one of the key platforms in that space with our new product, Conversocial. Right now, this is a “software as a service” product allowing brands to effectively moderate their Facebook fan pages, and going forward it will become a full engagement suite across all major social platforms (including both Facebook and Twitter), in combination with email and mobile. The first version is currently being tested with real clients – we believe in iterating quickly and getting real customer feedback, ensuring that whatever we build is something that people really need and use.

Conversocial connects with multiple social APIs and requires intelligent engineering to ensure the third-party web services are being used efficiently. Design and user experience is extremely important to the product, and we need to create clever ways to tie together and present the information we gather.

We’re looking for an experienced developer who is excited by the potential of the social web, and understands that talking to fans on Facebook is not the same as talking to followers on Twitter, or responding to email enquiries. You’ll have the vision to realise that the data available is getting richer all the time, and that each of these channels needs a subtly different approach. At the same time, we believe these channels need to be tied together so that companies can effectively manage the disparate conversations with their customers across all platforms.

In this role, you personally will have primary responsibility for the core social API integration and managing the polling functions across platforms. You’ll be working within a small agile team with a flat hierarchy, and will be a key part of the ongoing development of Conversocial.

We use flexible but robust technologies – primarily Python/Django, along with remote task libraries (Celery) over a distibuted message queue (Rabbit MQ).

This position requires someone with experience running a high-throughput web service, who understands the monitoring and self-recovery requirements that we need to build in. We can never make assumptions about how third-party web services behave. You know from experience that MySQL isn’t always the right tool for scalability (although we use that too).

Your experience is important, but you will need to be able to learn new technologies quickly, and to be responsive to the groaning made by a highly-active web service as it evolves. As a guide to the experience required, the web services you’ve dealt with will have at least sucked in RSS feeds from multiple sources (or something similar), and you’ll have worked around the difficulties involved with corrupted feeds, failed internet connections, and timestamps that are supposed to indicate feed changes but don’t… You will have optimised the service by making multi-threaded HTTP calls, while throttling the database connection to ensure you don’t overload it.

Ideally, you will know some Python/Django, or at least a similar language. Or you will be confident that your work in similar languages will allow you to pick it up quickly.

Candidates are likely to have excellent academic credentials.

iPlatform is a technology company that specialises in building social applications for the Facebook and Facebook Connect Platforms, as well as campaign management technology for fan pages and conversation based marketing.

Launched in early 2008, iPlatform works with some of the biggest agencies and brands in the UK and Europe, delivering multiple major Facebook based brand campaigns every month. Their team are experienced in planning, designing, building and maintaining social applications, from simple quizzes to large interactive flash games.

iPlatform have their own proprietary competition platform, allowing brands to run full UGC competitions inside their Facebook fan pages, with media upload (including integration with Facebook photos), voting, comments and leaderboards. A bespoke admin website for each client allows the platform to be used to run either large single competitions, or to run continual daily or weekly giveaways.

For fan page management, iPlatform have a number of tools to assist in management & moderation, content distribution and reporting, built to help agencies and large brands run their social campaigns more effectively.

Joshua March, Co-founder & CEO

Josh is an entrepreneur and specialist in the online and social media industry. He's been involved in the social network application space since Facebook first launched their application platform in 2007, and is Chairman of the Facebook Developer Garage London, a monthly non-profit event for social network developers sponsored by Facebook and Sun Microsystems.

Dan Lester, Co-founder & CTO

Dan is a highly experienced developer and technical architect, with a double first in maths from Oxford and five years experience developing software in the finance industry before leaving to work on his own projects. He was living in San Francisco when the first social network application platforms launched in 2007, where he built Open Socket, an Open Social container for Facebook, before moving back to London to found iPlatform with Josh.

Zai Iskandar, Account Manager

Zai is an experienced account and project manager and communications expert with a background in online PR and social media. During this time she worked for major clients across travel, food and drink, consumer electronics and broadcast such as Sony, BBC, Baileys and Hotel Chocolat, advising on social media strategy and managing events. She joined the iPlatform team in 2009 to manage our major accounts and campaigns.

Check out Josh's blog: http://www.joshuamarch.co.uk/
and the iPlatform blog here: http://theiplatform.com/category/news/