Overview

We started Poll Everywhere as a Ruby on Rails application and are expanding it into a world of smaller, single-purpose applications. We built our own realtime streaming service that integrates with Rails, firehose.io. This framework ensures fast, responsive presentations for the millions of Poll Everywhere presenters using our software. The problems we’re solving are unique, and we’re sharing our knowledge with RailsConf talks about realtime web app best practices and how to decouple Rails from specialized front end applications.

At Poll Everywhere, we pride ourselves on transparency, and strive to build as much of our software as we can out in the open. Our engineers are passionate about creating reliable software, so water-cooler talk may involve Service Objects or HATEOAS APIs.

Want to see how we build software? Check out the Poll Everywhere Playbook.

Are we the right match? See if this list resonates with your personal approach to development:

  • You have at least two years practical experience and an extensive portfolio.
  • You value self-driven learning, and enjoy receiving feedback to help increase your performance.
  • You write a balanced test suite while you code. Not too much – not too little.
  • You build Ruby web applications in addition to Rails web applications. See our stack here.
  • You like Haml, Sass, and CoffeeScript because they’re faster and prevent careless mistakes from impacting production.
  • You appreciate netbecause you enjoy making the lives of DevOps Engineers easier.
  • You know how to publish RubyGems because they’re an easy way to solve problems in a highly decoupled way.
  • You have deep knowledge of all the components of a web application, from optimizing a MySQL query to configuring HTTP headers in nginx to serving assets more efficiently for our presenters in Qatar.

We don’t care about:

  • Every technology you’ve used since you touched a keyboard, including DOA web services, IPX/SPX, Sonet/ATM networking experience, token ring, Banyan Vines, or LANtastic manager experience and so on.
  • Verbose resumes.

We are constantly growing the back end team and are looking for engineers with practical, real-world experience. From an ambitious junior developer with two years of experience and a strong portfolio, to a senior developer with ten years of building web applications, we are looking for high performers who love what they do.

Principals only, please. We aren’t using contingency staffing agencies at the moment. Poll Everywhere is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Good luck!

About Poll Everywhere

We make a popular app that lets audiences use their mobile phones to vote on questions - and have the results show up in the presentation instantly.

It’s been described as magic, kind of like running your own American Idol in PowerPoint. You see us used on TV, in stadiums, schools, concerts, CEO presentations, and little Chloe's kindergarten Idol talent competition (it's thrilling) - wherever an audience can text or tweet.

Our customers include Google, TED, McDonalds, Starbucks, and other assorted badasses large and small (like Chloe). We scare companies that make "Audience Response Systems" or "Clickers".

Poll Everywhere is a group of very real people who rise to do some pretty unreal things - whether that be changing the nature of presentations forever, building the world's largest audience response system, or plotting attacks during a week-long spy game in Sonoma.

We're small, so you solve big problems and take on big responsibilities from day one. And you have a say — in what we build, how we build it, and even what kind of beef jerky is stocked in the kitchen. We get to do that because we only hire bright people, which means you'll work with an equally bright team.

We genuinely like what we do and we genuinely like each other. It's a pretty magical combination that drives us to be better every day, and have an awesome time doing it. Come visit us in San Francisco.