We're looking for programmers who want to learn how to build a top-tier social network, love to build cool stuff and work hard, can communicate well, and have a personality that fits in with ours.

Our development philosophy is to work individually or in pairs, building everything from front-end to back-end. We divide up work on a project to project basis, and you'd be responsible for making sure your features have a clear user-interface, scale for millions of users, and have legible and easy to maintain code. You should be comfortable with those skills or dying to learn them!

Required skills:

• Proficient programming with MVC frameworks. Ruby on Rails is preferred, but we'll take PHP, Python or Java.
• Knowledge of SQL (MySQL preferred).
• Experience with HTML, Javascript, and CSS.
• Comfort using the Linux operating system (shell scripting, cronjobs, installing software, etc).

We prefer people that are passionate about:

• Reading books!
• Building social networks and building great product.
• A/B testing and optimizing user experience
• Building large scale websites (MySQL, Memcached, Sharding, etc)
• Thinking creatively and engaging and listening to users.
• Experience building your own website or startup is a plus - we like entrepreneurs.

Open positions

• Facebook/MySpace app developer. You will be in charge of working on the Goodreads Books app on Facebook, MySpace, and other platforms. You should love Facebook, and either know or be willing to learn a lot about making things viral.
• Senior software engineer. You will be in charge of helping to develop new products and features and scale existing ones. You should be comfortable discussing: Memcached, MySql optimization, Database sharding, Lucene, Facebook, Opensocial, xml/json/rest, nginx/haproxy/mongrel, and more.

Interested candidates should submit a code sample as well as a resume. Also, answering our design challenge will ensure your resume will be read.

We're looking for a junior person who is willing to wear many hats. Customer service is a word many people associate with a lower-level position, but at Goodreads we place prime importance on it. We believe community building and talking to the customer is a key to our success, and the best way to market a product. We're looking for someone to help manage our community communication, as well as help with other areas such as advertising operations, publisher & author relations, and marketing.

Required skills:

• Passion about books and reading.
• Very strong communication skills, both oral and written.
• Experience in the book publishing/selling industry.
• Strong understanding of websites and the ability to diagnose problems when talking to customers.

Job requirements:

• Customer service: helping customers with issues navigating and using the site. Answering email and questions on the site's forums, approving authors, moderating discussion forums.
• Advertising operations: help with advertising reporting and communication with authors, publishers, and other advertisers.
• Author Relations: help build relationships with authors, publishers, and booksellers.