Job Descriptions

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I’ve found that writing job descriptions is harder than I thought. In particular, it’s harder because I’m writing for so many audiences: for the internal developers and PMs who might be interested, the external folks, for other managers, and so on.

Here’s one. What would make it better?

Software Development Engineer

10 PRINT "This is way cool"

20 GOTO 10

Does this look like your first program? At any given time, there are about 25 million people going through the same thing. The Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT) is a startup team focused on building a set of tools for these customers. Our team has a simple charter: create a wave of hobbyist and student developers using Microsoft technologies by making programming fun, rewarding and cool.

We’re creating a next-generation development experience for hobbyists, students, and novices – something where programming is fun and getting started is simple. This means exploring new UI paradigms, leveraging the latest advances in programming languages, and creating a collection of domain-specific frameworks and libraries that make it easy to create cool experiences with animations and rich graphics that cross online and offline scenarios as well as different devices, browsers, and applications.

We’re a small team with minimal process overhead committed to steering clear of big oil tankers and to shipping software quickly. In fact, we’re driving to ship something once a week to keep the community buzz going, which means we need to get much smarter about how we design, build, and test software. Come help make us smarter.

This startup team needs a smart, customer-focused developer to create a range of solutions and experiences, and to enable us to become the most nimbly shipping product both on-cycle and off-cycle.

The candidate must have a have a BS or MS, and at least 5 years of commercial software programming in C or C++. The candidate needs a working knowledge of C#, Javascript, and ASP.NET. You will also need strong communication skills and the ability to effectively manage cross-group relationships. There’s lots of room for growth in this startup team, so get on board early.