Software Developer for a real-time chat platform

Background

Gaglers is a scalable real-time chat platform. Currently, we offer live chat with unlimited operators and community chat for support.

Our high-level technical challenges are,

• scaling a real-time platform to millions of concurrent users.
• measure all interactions to make data driven decisions

This is a full-time position based in Bangalore, India. We'll also consider interns, who might turn into a full-time employee after the internship

Typical Day at the Job

You'll work directly with the Founder. You'll be working to implement new features of the product.

Here is how a typical day will look like. You start by looking the status of the production dashboard and bugs. With a quick scan you find that that the message counts are not getting updated in the dashboard after the code push last night. You jump on it right way and send a short code-review out, after testing it on your staging setup.

With that out of the way, you get back to the feature that you have been working on. You know exactly why you are building this feature and what impact it will have on the customers. The feature was specced out last week in some intense design discussions. You finished a quick prototype yesterday. You throw it out today and start the code and unit testing for the initial release. The plan is to deploy a basic version this week sometime, gather feedback over a few days and then fine-tune it based on what the customers say.

Just after lunch, while you code, you come across a bug in the queuing sub-system. You decide that it would be simple for you to fix it as well and so you do. While you fixed the bug, you thought about how you can make the queuing system much more scalable. You write a quick note to yourself to talk about it later.

By the end of the day you'll have a good chunk of the new feature implemented. You'll send that queuing system bug fix for code-review tomorrow morning and continue your work of the new feature.

How the role will develop

Initially, the tasks you take on will be smaller and fairly well defined. Longer term, the requirements you get will be more general, and you’ll interpret them to produce great solutions. You’ll also generate tasks on your own initiative as you identify opportunities.

As we grow, we may need to take on more developers. You’ll have the opportunity to be responsible for these folks if you want.

Technical Qualifications

You will be,

• fluent in Django and Python and comfortable using Git
• be happy with HTML and Javascript
• have designed and written applications using Django
• comfortable managing a group of remote linux servers.

You'll have the opportunity to work on all areas of our stack. Our technology stack includes,

• Django, Python, Erlang
• Redis, MySQL
• RabbitMQ, Celery
• MemCache
• Bootstrap, JQuery, Javascript

We are looking for someone who sees their role as bigger than just programming. You'll also get to know our business. You'll also look for opportunities to make things cooler for our customers.

Your Challenge

Implement a webpage that will take a line of text as input. If the input contains a URL, fetch the first image from the URL and display it below the text box. Make the necessary assumptions and defaults required to complete the task.

Example:

If the given text is

"Hey, check this out, http://gaglers.com/blog/2013/03/29/live-chat-software-unlimited-agents/. I love it."

The webpage must display the line of text and the image of the sun from the blog entry