Mixlr is a fast-growing platform for social live audio with millions of users across the world.
We would like an experienced engineer to join our small, passionate team and take responsibility for bringing the Mixlr experience to the Android world.
The app will include live audio streaming, chat, discovery and all the key features that mobile users already enjoy in our successful iOS app.
You will have experience of building at least one non-trivial native Android app. The following attributes would also be advantageous:
* dedication to designing and building fantastic user interfaces
* knowledge of live streaming protocols, especially on mobile
* passion for music apps and/or audio programming
* experience working with JSON and RESTful APIs
* broad knowledge of different Android devices
* experience with test-driven development
* proficiency of at least one other language apart from Java, especially: C, C++, Ruby or JavaScript
We're looking to meet a forward-thinking DevOps engineer to join us at Mixlr and take responsibility for our comprehensive web and live streaming architecture.
Mixlr is a platform for social radio. We make streaming live audio easy for tens of thousands of broadcasters streaming to millions of listeners every month - this means our entire architecture has to be both rock-solid and amazingly scalable. We've already moved mountains to make this happen, and are hugely proud of the system we've built. Now we want to meet the engineer who will take us to the next level of scaling.
We would like to meet a highly competent engineer who has a passion for both music or radio and systems engineering, who will be responsible for maintaining, improving and evolving our entire technical infrastructure. This will include the configuration, deployment and performance-tuning of our live streaming services, web servers, databases, testing services and overall physical and virtual hosting.
We're looking to meet a forward-thinking DevOps engineer to join us at Mixlr and take responsibility for our comprehensive web and live streaming architecture.
Mixlr is a platform for social radio. We make streaming live audio easy for tens of thousands of broadcasters streaming to millions of listeners every month - this means our entire architecture has to be both rock-solid and amazingly scalable. We've already moved mountains to make this happen, and are hugely proud of the system we've built. Now we want to meet the engineer who will take us to the next level of scaling.
We would like to meet a highly competent engineer who has a passion for both music or radio and systems engineering, who will be responsible for maintaining, improving and evolving our entire technical infrastructure. This will include the configuration, deployment and performance-tuning of our live streaming services, web servers, databases, testing services and overall physical and virtual hosting.
Mixlr is a platform for live audio with nearing 1 million registered users. We've built a series of products based around an extensive live broadcasting infrastructure, all fully maintained and managed in house.
We have a strong sense of product and design, and an interesting and scalable technical architecture.
We've got to where we are as a team of four. Now we're looking to expand and would like to talk to smart and passionate engineers who want to join us.
--- C++ engineer (full-time, London)
Our cross-platform desktop app is written is C++, and is a core part of our service.
We're looking to find somebody who is comfortable with deploying (beautfully written, maintainable) C++ applications to multiple platforms, and has at least a working knowledge of audio or video callbacks and streaming techniques.
We make heavy use of the QT framework, so some familiarity here would be useful, and the standard Unix toolchain features heavily in our workflow (we currently build using MinGW for Windows).
At Mixlr, we debug multithreading problems before breakfast. And because our app is currently a web/native hybrid, being comfortable working with networking and a good knowledge of web development techniques would be an advantage.
--- Dev-ops/Sysadmin (full-time, London).
At Mixlr our product requires an extensive and occasionally challenging backend infrastructure.
We are looking to find an experienced backend engineer with deep knowledge of managing both virtualized and physical environments. A strong knowledge of Amazon Web Services is a must, as that's where our entire stack is deployed right now.
We use Puppet to manage and deploy our servers, Ruby for scripting and run a 100% Linux environment making strong use of the Unix tool chain.
Experience of deploying and monitoring Ruby on Rails applications: we currently extend Nginx with a Lua caching layer, to enable us to use full page-caching for the majority of our website traffic. Being comfortable debugging, maintaining and improving this layer will be essential. Knowledge of MongoDB, Redis and deploying various applications on the Java virtual machine would also be directly relevant.
As with all of our roles, a passion for music and/or audio is a plus!
--- Android developer (full-time, London)
We've already designed and released a successful and well-received mobile application for iOS, and now we are planning to bring the full Mixlr experience to Android devices.
We are looking for an experienced Android developer to join the team on a permanent basis, and design and build Mixlr's Android app - from the first Git commit onwards.
We're looking for somebody to hit the ground running, so were you to apply you should have prior experience in building a non-trivial Android app. You should be confident with advanced Java programming techniques including advanced multithreading techniques.
As with all of our positions, you'll be interacting extensively with our various web services and the wider internet, so being comfortable in the world of networking would be an advantage.
--- Rails developer (full-time, London)
Our website is still the core way in which our users interact with Mixlr, and we have big plans for it going forward.
The ideal candidate would have extensive Ruby on Rails experience and be comfortable working with an extensive Rspec test suite. We make heavy use of the jQuery and Backbone JavaScript frameworks, write our CSS using SCSS, and rely on MongoDB and Redis to store and cache our data.
We would like to meet a smart, passionate Rails developer who is eager to extend their skill set, working on a fast-growing product with thousands of daily users.
If you want to talk more to us, drop me a line: rob@mixlr.com
I can imagine a scenario where we wanted a sub-domain which didn't redirect, but also wasn't crawlable. But I agree the example is a little bit contrived ;)
Our main goal is to avoid passing requests upstream to Rails, which has massive performance penalties (TCP/IP, probably multiple database hits, web servers written in Ruby).
By keeping everything non-blocking and inside the Nginx event loop, and cutting the upstream out entirely, we are making a massive saving on each request. This definitely outweighs a small performance penalty incurred for using LuaJIT.
I'm no Ruby expert, but I think the massive performance penalties of Rails are mostly not in the Ruby interpreter itself. Rails is a huge project and it does a lot of work.
It is possible that Ruby is impracticably slow in itself, I guess.
Keeping things non-blocking and inside the Nginx event loop doesn't specifically mean you have to use Lua, does it?
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that it's not desirable to reduce the load on your backend web servers?
I'm neither a Lua expert nor an evangelist, but my clear impression is that Lua is much more suited to embedding in a web server than Ruby or Python. On the Lua website it is described as "a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language" - that's not a description I would ascribe to either Ruby or Python. I also know that Lua has a long history of being embedded in games, embedded systems and other servers like Redis. Perhaps somebody more experienced in Lua can help me out here though.
In this case there seems to be good evidence that Lua is the right tool for the job.
One minor point- in your first comment you talk about interpreted Lua code, but this is not accurate because Lua can be compiled down to byte code before being loaded into Nginx.
Finally - "Embedding Python in a web server is quite doable". I would be interested to read a blog post about your experiments in this area ;)
I love Ruby. It is my favourite language by far. And I strongly believe that it is possible to do a Ruby implementation that is fast enough for most uses.
But current implementations are slow. And there are a lot of things in the language that makes a fast implementation hard. For example the fact that class definitions are executable and can be re-opened at any time, including by passing a string to eval(). They combine to make it extremely hard to make method calls fast. And since pretty much everything is method calls in Ruby, that's not good.
As an example, a Ruby implementation has to be able to deal with code that might overload the + method for integers, so even basic stuff like integer additions can't be statically inlined without precautions to handle cases like that.
I'd say for what they're doing, with tiny little rewrites in Nginx, Lua might be better suited - the Lua implementation is known for being extremely fast.
Android engineer - London - Mixlr http://dev.mixlr.com
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Mixlr is a fast-growing platform for social live audio with millions of users across the world.
We would like an experienced engineer help our small, passionate team bring the Mixlr experience to the Android world.
The app will include live audio streaming, chat, discovery and all the key features that mobile users already enjoy in our successful iOS app.
You will have experience of building at least one non-trivial native Android app. The following attributes would also be advantageous:
* dedication to designing and building fantastic user interfaces
* knowledge of live streaming protocols, especially on mobile
* passion for music apps and/or audio programming
* experience working with JSON and RESTful APIs
* broad knowledge of different Android devices
* experience with test-driven development
* proficiency of at least one other language apart from Java, especially: C, C++, Ruby or JavaScript
For more information please see our dev portal: http://dev.mixlr.com