Building spider.io

You! As part of the spider.io team you will use and develop cutting-edge algorithms and technologies to outwit extremely talented, extremely devious, extremely motivated engineers. Each and every day you will face new challenges and new puzzles. You will have a competitive salary and you will be based in London’s West End. If you are capable of a leading TopCoder rating, and you are keen on a dynamic, challenging environment, then try our treasure hunt for hackers; try your hand at these questions; and then please get in touch with us at careers@spider.io. [Hat tip to xkcd.]

Dr Douglas de Jager is our CEO. He is a poacher turned gamekeeper, having previously founded BytePlay Ltd, a VC-backed company which provided content scraping as a service to clients including: DMGT, Trinity Mirror, Archant Media, Zoopla, Fish4 and the Evening Standard. He has been an invited speaker at Google and Microsoft. He has published papers on performance analysis, Web information retrieval and asynchronous algorithms. He received his PhD in Computing from Imperial College London, following an MSc in Computing (Imperial) and an MA in Mathematics and Philosophy (Oxford).

Dr Simon Overell is our Chief Scientist. He previously led the Web Mining and NLP projects at True Knowledge; before this he worked for Yahoo! Research Barcelona on supervised classification of Wikipedia articles and Flickr tags. He has published papers on how people use place names in context, place name disambiguation, classifying articles and geographic IR. He received his PhD in Computing from Imperial College London, following a first class MEng in Artificial Intelligence.

Dr Ashley Brown is our Chief Architect. He has previously worked on quantum chemical modelling, pipeline inspection robots and a control system for newspaper presses. He has published papers on the use of speculative hardware optimisations to accelerate key kernels for scientific computations. He received his PhD in Computing from Imperial College London, following a first class MEng in Computing (Imperial).

Ben Hodgson hunts botnets, builds client-side reverse Turing tests and elegantly hacks JavaScript edge cases. He developed a first-of-its-kind tool for detecting the visibility of content in cross-domain iframes, and is an author of the associated patent application. He has a BSc in Computer Science (Southampton).

Vegard Johnsen is our Chief Customer Officer. He was previously a Lead Consultant at Stroud, one of the foremost operations consultancies. After nearly a decade on factory floors across the globe, Vegard returned to his roots: he is currently ranked 30th in our challenge; and he also wrote a link extractor on our first hack day, wrapping BeautifulSoup. He has a MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences (Cambridge).

Joe Tallett is responsible for build systems, deployment systems and cluster management. He protects us from the Chaos Monkey. He was previously on BSkyB’s identity management team. He received an MSc with Distinction in Informatics (Manchester).

Nick Johnson works on our big data platform, helping process and analyse all the data we receive. Before joining our team, he worked at Google, where he worked on App Engine, and is the author of several of its core features. When not at spider HQ, Nick enjoys blogging about Computer Science, writing Python code, and building things using microcontrollers.

Join us and help us build spider.io.