Kiva zip

Called the "hottest non-profit on the planet" by FORTUNE magazine and a Top 50 Website by TIME, Kiva (www.kiva.org) is the world's first personal micro-lending marketplace with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. In just 8 years, Kiva has raised over $500 million for more than 1 million borrowers in 73 countries. Kiva combines the culture and approach of an internet start-up with an intense focus on alleviating poverty and serving the borrower-to-lender connection. Kiva is poised to take its initial success to a whole new level - targeting $1 billion in loans by 2017 and continued expansion into new areas (e.g. student loans, water, mobile, etc.). Headquartered in San Francisco, Kiva's team has 100+ employees and 500+ volunteers worldwide.

As a microfinancing pioneer, and a mission-driven technology organization, we are looking for several people to join our stellar engineering team! We are an aggressive, fast-paced, user-centric team focused on connecting people through stories, media, and technology to help enable that economic opportunity for those that don’t have access to it. We are a world class engineering team that is as passionate about improving the quality of life of others as we are passionate about building well engineered, creative, engaging and reliable software systems. All Kivans are self-driven leaders, who collaborate well, communicate effectively, and have fun at work as well as having varied interests outside of the office.

This small team of engineers, working mostly in Ruby-on-Rails, has been proving out the effectiveness of direct-to-borrower transactions, and it is now time to move this into the mainstream. We need an Engineering Leader who is hands-on, but who also enjoys being involved in collaborating on business decisions, as well as technical ones. Excellent collaboration skills are required as the Zip team leverages engineering resources across the entire Kiva Engineering organization, and so a balancing of priorities is always required. This position requires a very self-driven leader, who can build short term plans and they get the team to execute while enjoying the all of the new ground being forged in the world of micro financing

If you:
Are passionate about Kiva's mission and about high quality engineering
Are a fast paced, creative engineer who takes pride in what you build
Embrace agility and user-centered focus as a key design criteria
Like to own a portion of the system, but always with an eye on how it can make the whole product better;
Understand the issues of designing and building reliable, scalable software;
Have demonstrated skill and enthusiasm for learning about and applying new technologies when appropriate.
Naturally approach large projects with an eye to building small pieces that can be delivered iteratively
Value collaboration with smart, motivated teammates; you share what you know and appreciate feedback that helps grow too; Think that well-defined, elegant code is just as beautiful as the best HTML & CSS designs

… You might be the engineer we are looking for...

Required Skills

BSCS/BSEE or related technical discipline
Competency in PHP; ability to learn, debug, and fix existing PHP code
Experience working as part of a dynamic fast moving, self driven team
Strong ability to pick up complex, mid-flight projects.
Excellent collaborator, be able to work across the entire Kiva Zip Engineering team
Programming experience in Ruby-on-Rails, LAMP stack
Solid understanding of web deployment architectures