We’re Hiring

Purpose of Role
Last.fm is looking for a Lead Web Developer with a combination of strong PHP / SQL, software design principles, and hands-on architectural / framework expertise, as well as knowledge of XHTML, CSS and Javascript.

The Lead Web Developer will lead a team of PHP and front end web developers to deliver high quality software following an Agile development process.
The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic and innovative, good at “getting things done”, and have experience using Last.fm / AS.

Deliverables and Responsibilities

• Designing and implementing core software components for new Last.fm website features
• Improving our internal PHP tools and frameworks
• Identifying bottlenecks and profiling Last.fm's existing PHP codebase
• Improving development practices at Last.fm
• Leading team of 6-8 developers
• Technical mentoring of developers
• Ensuring software delivered by the team is of requisite quality

Key Relationships

• Web Development Team
• Design Team
• Technical Operations
• Product Management

Skills and Experience

• An intimate familiarity with object-oriented PHP & standards-compliant SQL
• Experience with XHTML, CSS and Javascript
• 5+ years experience working on high-volume PHP websites
• 2+ years experience leading software development teams
• 2+ years experience in Agile software development, preferably Scrum
• Expert knowledge of Agile engineering practices including Test Driven Development
• Independent problem solving skills, ability to write code that scales well
• Understanding of how the web works, from low to high levels
• Familiarity with a wide range of relevant technologies and web standards
• Flexibility: we are small company, but we move quickly

Desirable

• Experience with C / PHP internals
• Smarty templating system (smarty.php.net) and extensions
• Subversion
• Memcached
• Web services and syndication
• Linux CLI
• Experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL
• A preference for vi over emacs
• Certified Scrum Master

Education and Qualifications

• Honours degree level education in relevant discipline

Behaviours & Personality

• Willingness to commit to a goal
• Ability to focus on job in hand
• Openness and clarity in communication
• Strong leadership
• Ability to work well in a collaborative team environment
• Desire and drive to deliver

Last.fm is looking for a system administrator to help support our growing infrastructure. The role is mainly focused on our server infrastructure, and also includes some desktop support in the office. A keen interest in Linux and networking is essential, as is a thirst for more knowledge in related areas. You will be working within our systems engineering team to maintain and expand the hardware and tools that keep Last.fm on the air.

We have junior and more senior positions available.

Responsibilities

• Configure new servers, including linux installs (debian/ubuntu) and network setup
• Assist in network management tool administration
• Development support
• Hardware installs and bringing new equipment online at our datacentres
• Hardware maintenance and troubleshooting (why is it broken, dead disks and what not)

Desired skills

• Linux and sysadmin-fu
• Good LAN and WAN troubleshooting skills
• Windows Desktop Support; email / printing / network connectivity
• Desktop installation and setup of new office machines
• Scripting skills
• A preference for vi over emacs

Purpose of Role
We're seeking an exceptional software engineer to join the small and very enthusiastic data and recommendations team at Last.fm. Most of our backend is written in C++. The position is full-time and based in London.

You’ll help us scale and build exciting new features. You have a strong desire to learn new things and improve existing ones. You pay attention to detail and take great pride in your work. You’ll be working with a great team of very passionate engineers.

Responsibilities

• Analyze, test, optimize, maintain, design and build core backend software components
• Code using primarily C++ (STL/Boost)

Requirements

• Expert knowledge developing and debugging in C++ on *nix
• Experience building large-scale server applications
• Interested in: computational complexity, scalability, bloom filters, caching algorithms, multithreading, radix trees, LSH, template metaprogramming, debugging core dumps, thrift, boost spirit, bogosort, and much more
• MSc in computer science or related is a plus

Last.fm is looking for an experienced Java developer to work on the
services powering the biggest music site on the planet. You should be
capable of working on all aspects of the software development cycle from
architecture, coding and testing through to deployment. You will be
working on services related to the Last.fm music catalogue including
importing and managing music and related metadata as well as making this
information available to other internal systems. You should have strong
relational database and SQL skills including prior work involving a
complex database schema. You will work on maintaining and extending
existing systems as well as creating new ones. You will need to be able
to code systems that are distributed, scalable and fault-tolerant under
heavy load. You will need a working knowledge of the core Java libraries
and various third party open source libraries as well as experience with
multithreading and design patterns.

We do not believe in matching developer CV's against list of buzzwords -
we look for smart people with good general programming skills as we
believe that clever developers can learn new technologies quickly and
well. However it wouldn't hurt if you have some experience with any of
the following:

- Object Relational Mapping tools (e.g. Hibernate, Ibatis).
- XML (your applications will probably need to process a lot of this).
- Unit testing (we take Quality Control seriously - see here for more:
http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control).
- PostgreSQL, mySQL (we use both these databases extensively).
- Java application servers like Tomcat.
- Linux (all our servers run Linux so you'll need to be comfortable with
a command line shell).
- API design.
- JMS.
- Spring.
- Last.fm (being a user of the site doesn't hurt ;) ).
- Foosball or table tennis.

The role is full time, and based near Old Street, London.