We’re Hiring!

We’re looking for an exceptional programmer to join the team – which is currently two full-timers and a band of freelance designers and programmers.

The Dextrous Web was founded with a specific mission in mind. We want to build exemplary, smart web projects for the public sector. We think that Government can get much more out of the web than it does, and create much better websites than it has, and we want to help make that happen.

We’ve spent the last couple of years doing all sorts of things: from building simple but important websites for consultations and programmes to crowdsourcing datasets for MySociety, munging PDFs into XML to make interactive consultation tools and helping Government departments to put RDFa into their web pages.

We’re looking for a very specific person to come on board. You’re a programmer, you’ve probably been one for quite a while, and you might be the best programmer you’ve ever met. You write code all the time, because you enjoy it. You’ve probably made a website or two that do interesting things. You might have made some desktop applications, too, and you almost always finish what you start.

You display the classic and indispensable qualities of excellent programmers everywhere: laziness, impatience and hubris. You enjoy learning to use new languages, platforms and frameworks, and you’re quick about it. You have a fanatical obsession with usability, and writing beautiful, elegant applications makes you all happy on the inside – but you’re pragmatic enough to JFDI when things need to get finished. You understand that real people use computers too, and that telling the client to learn to use rsync just won’t fly.

More concretely, you’ve made stuff with Ruby on Rails, PHP and Javascript. You know RESTful architectures and the HTTP protocol. You’re an XHTML/CSS wizard, you understand why this comic is funny and if your website got Slashdotted, there’s no way it would fall over. You know your way around a terminal. You’ve used JSON, YAML, XML, ATOM, RDF and all their cousins and you understand them reasonably well.

For the right candidate, we’re offering a competitive salary, limitless coffee, a nice computer to work on and lots of interesting things to do.

If you’re this person, we’d love to meet you. First read the job description, then pop your CV over for us to see. Make sure you tell us about something you’ve made (preferably a website, and where to find it). If more than one person was involved, let us know what your bit was. If there’s anything else you want to tell us about yourself, include that too!

We’re looking forward to meeting you. The closing date for applications is July 30th 2010.

Agencies: Thanks, but no thanks. We’re only accepting direct applications.