Do you want to transform the way people build websites and online services? Do you want to have impact across multiple products and services such as Windows Live, MSN and Microsoft.com? Do you want to join a new team with huge growth potential? Do you want to be part of the software+services revolution? Then join the Microsoft Experimentation Platform team.
The Experimentation Platform enables website designers and service builders to radically improve their offerings using controlled experiments with live users. The platform allows such people to test new ideas quickly using the best-known scientific method for establishing causality between a feature and its effects: randomized experimental design. Our methodology is to expose a percentage of users to a new variation of the website or service, measure the effect on the business, and run statistical tests to determine whether the differences were caused by the change. Experimentation, when used properly, encourages more agile design and release cycles and can literally transform the way websites and online services are developed.
Our plan is first to enable experimentation everywhere Microsoft has an online presence (think of MSN, Windows Live, Xbox.com, Microsoft.com, etc), and then to take experimentation to the world, making it available to anyone who runs a website or online service. Our team functions like a startup, giving you endless opportunities to learn and develop and exposing you to a wide range of technology. You will also see the result of your work quickly: we use agile programming methodologies and test-driven development to deliver a high-quality platform at a rapid pace, deploying updates to our system as often as once per month. Finally, you will be working with a very high caliber team in a very flat organization with high visibility, giving you the opportunity to work alongside and learn from top engineers in the field.
We are looking for top notch SDEs and SDETs to help us deliver our data collection and analysis subsystems. The data collection subsystem consists of a highly-scalable, highly-available instrumentation platform built on web services, Cosmos, and SQL Server 2005. This system must process data quickly and reliably but also able to scale up to handle massive websites like MSN.com. The analysis subsystem consists of a web application that performs statistical analysis on the data and exposes results to experimenters. Here, you will craft a user experience that presents the results of statistical tests quickly and accurately yet in a way that is understandable to nontechnical users. Both subsystems make extensive use of web services and are based on .Net and C#.
SDEs will develop the core services that make up the platform. The team is small so you will be involved in all aspects of development, including architecture, design, coding, and operations. Because the platform is relatively new, you will have the unique opportunity to have a huge impact on design and architecture decisions.
SDETs will build automation that tests both our data collection and analysis subsystems at various levels. You will be doing whatever it takes, from establishing test infrastructure to rapid automated testing of features/subsystems on demand, to writing common reusable test libraries. In addition you will contribute to the design of the platform from a QA standpoint.
Ideal candidates will have:
• Proven track record of delivery
• Strong object-oriented programming skills in C++, C#, or Java.
• Strong interest in either high-performance, high-availability software/services or reporting and data visualization.
• MS degree in Computer Science or BS degree plus two years of experience as a developer or tester.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Energy and desire to deliver high-quality software quickly through iterative development.
Additionally, experience in web-based GUI development and data.
Interested? Go to http://exp-platform.com/ep_jobs.aspx and check out more detail. If interested, send us email (address on web site) and please mention the joelonsoftware site.