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Overview
Songkick is looking for an experienced developer to lead the data acquisition and processing activities of our small but extremely talented technical team.

We are web startup creating a site for live music fans to make it easier and more fun to discover and go to concerts. This Guardian post (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/apr/02/elevatorpitchsongkickwants) is a good overview, but there are even more exciting developments underway behind the scenes. We’re 18-months old and growing fast, with a 11-person team (all big live music fans ourselves..) based in Shoreditch, east London.

Backed by experienced investors in web and music companies – including Y Combinator, Dan Porter (co-founder, Ticketweb), Stefan Glaenzer (ex-Chairman, Last.fm), and Index Ventures (investments include Skype, MySQL, Last.fm and Viagogo) – we are well capitalised for the next 2 years.

This is an opportunity to work on some very hard, very intriguing problems; we are engaged in massive-scale data acquisition and processing. Our CEO and CTO have backgrounds in machine learning which is indicative of the way we approach these challenges.

We’re looking for people with a genuine passion for the disruptive power of the web, and a desire to work in a fast-paced startup environment and share in the excitement of growing a global business.
Salary + Start Date + Perks
Competitive salary + generous stock options. Start date ASAP. Perks include monthly concert tickets stipend (use-it-or-lose-it), great location, and charming multi-national colleagues hailing from California to Rio Grande via Bedford and Schw�bisch Hall.
Responsibilities
* heading the data acquisition- and processing side of our development operations, providing tools to maintain our comprehensive database of live music information
* developing strategies for data acquisition, storage, quality assurance and processing to support our website and other products
* leading and growing a ‘data team’ within our team of in-house developers:
* motivating individuals and developing their skills
* identifying, and recruiting for, skills gaps
* interacting with outsourced developers to provide datafeed adaptors, web scrapers etc. as necessary
* monitoring our data processing systems and ensuring scalability as demand increases
* Interacting with our quality assurance team to ensure that data-related issues are resolved in a timely fashion
What we're looking for
* experience providing and scaling an infrastructure from an early stage to maturity to support data intensive web applications and services, ideally within a UNIX/Linux environment
* experience designing and implementing systems to aggregate noisy, ambiguous, heterogeneous data from multiple sources
* experience designing and implementing systems using a combination of automated and manual processes to ensure a high level of data quality
* proven ability to effectively lead, motivate and grow a team of developers
Also a big plus would be experience of
* agile / lean development practices
* test- and behaviour-driven development
* Ruby on Rails
* experience of using popular data processing and search tools such as Nutch, Lucene, Hadoop, Ferret
To apply
Please send your CV, URLs of cool things you've built / worked on, and a short email introducing yourself to joinsongkick@songkick.com by 31st January 2009. Tell us about the most recent gig you’ve been to if you like!