Verba Software

We're making higher education more affordable: Helping students compare their bookstore’s prices to those of its online competitors; Giving recommendations on close-to-market bookstore prices; Getting professor book choices in faster; Helping bookstores buy and sell books on a level playing field.

We guide every stage of a used book’s life. We help students save money, and bookstores become and stay relevant, competitive, and transparent.

Metrics: 350 colleges and universities, serving 4.5 million students, tracking ~200k unique book titles, integrating with 7 vendors & 20 retailers, raising the “win rate” for bookstores to 80%, and dropping prices across the board. 17 employees, 3 part-time. 2 dogs. 5 cats. 3 children.

Profitable. Growing.

Code: Ruby, Rails, JS (Coffeescript/Backbone), Clojure for Hadoop, MySQL on RDS, AWS w/ Chef. We love experiments and go with what works! We also love making a stable, solid product which is why we have a ton of metrics and a one-click build pipeline.

What’s in it for you: A great team and company culture, benefits (even for part time!), a laptop, unlimited books, BART pass, pool table, healthy (and un-) office snacks, great conversation during our yearly company work-cations, and hard, challenging, fulfilling, good (in the public sense) work.

Message us if: You want to help make education better. You’ve got strong Rails knowledge (several years worth), solid testing practices, a good head for architecture, and know enough JS to help out on front-end. A stats background, experience with Hadoop and knowledge of scheduling algorithms would be awesome, but not required.

How to get the job: Write a cover letter to jobs@verbasoftware.com that speaks to why this job might fit with you, and how you could help us out. The first step is a phone screen to solve a small programming problem. Then we’ll schedule an on-site interview for a few hours, where you'll present for 15 minutes on any topic you'd like, have you walk through some of our code with us, and then deep-dive into the whole stack. Also we’ll ask you some historical behavior questions, not logic puzzles. Then we’ll make you an offer, and you’ll accept and we have a new employee party!

(And now a personal message from me!)

I came for the people. I've been at a few companies, I've written a lot of code, and in the end it's who you spend every day with that matters and shapes you.

The problems of higher education are many, and this is just one avenue of attack, but it's a fantastic start. Books are simply way too expensive.

What surprised me the most when joining was that everyone in the company is very kind, that their customers LOVE them, and everyone is highly performing. This doesn't mean that everyone just works long hours and burns out - no, it seems everyone is careful about being at their mental peak and intend to stay that way. This informs every aspect of the culture here: planning, creating, getting feedback, paying off technical debt, retrospectives, always thinking about how to work better and more easily, time off, going to conferences, health care, 401k. Everything.

It's like this company wants to stay around for a long time or something.

JOIN US AND MAKE EDUCATION GOOD