Jobs at Zimride

Zimride's industry-leading rideshare service helps organizations establish easy to use, private, social networks for ridesharing. We have over 50 of the nation's leading universities and companies as clients including Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Esurance and CIGNA. Our goal is to bring this new form of sustainable transportation to millions of users around the world.

We are currently hiring for the following positions:

• Director of Engineering
• Senior Designer / Front-End Developer
• Software Engineer
• Account manager
• Sales representative

All positions are based in our Palo Alto office and include medical benefits and equity.

To apply send a cover letter and resume to jobs@zimride.com

Director of Engineering

About You

You are an extraordinarily talented and experienced engineer willing to get your hands dirty with everything from system admin to CSS. You are also comfortable managing our small development team and have the leadership skills needed to head Zimride's product. You're capable of working with our full stack: PHP, Zend Framework, Memcached, Smarty templates, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Google Maps API, Facebook Platform, svn, trac, Linux, Apache, and AWS EC2/S3.

Your Responsibilities

• Lead application architecture
• Help mentor other engineers and conduct code reviews
• Design and implement features that help improve the Zimride user experience
• Optimize code for speed and reliability
• Oversee system security and stability
• Plan and manage team sprints
• Help build out development team

You Must Have

• B.S., M.S., or PhD. in Computer Science or equivalent
• Tons of experience with object-oriented PHP programming
• Expertise in MySQL query optimization and server administration
• Experience leading other developers
• Experience operating, tuning, and scaling Linux-based web applications
• Great oral and written communication skills
• Ability to thrive in a startup environment

Bonus Points For

• Experience with Zend Framework
• Experience with mobile development
• Experience building APIs
• Previous work with social networks
• Contributions to open source projects
• Passion for sustainability and/or transportation

Programming Challenge (Optional)

Calculate the detour distance between two different rides. Given four lattitude / longitude pairs, where driver one is traveling from point A to point B and driver two is traveling from point C to point D, write a function (in your language of choice) to calculate the shorter of the detour distances the drivers would need to take to pick-up and drop-off the other driver.

Senior Designer / Front-End Developer

About You

You are a dynamic, experienced designer and a creative, accomplished front-end developer mixed into one. You're as comfortable playing an important role in shaping our product roadmap as you are designing and implementing features that define the user experience. You're capable of taking an early stage idea and building it out into a fully baked product on pace with our engineering team.

Your Responsibilities

• Design and develop beautiful, simple and enjoyable interfaces and interactions
• Work closely with the entire team to improve our product and long-term vision
• Communicate with our customers to help turn issues and requests into solutions
• Optimize and streamline our user experience to simplify site use and encourage continued engagement

You Must Have

• A portfolio of relevant projects highlighting both design and development
• Strong front-end development capabilities including HTML/CSS/JS
• Experience working closely with engineers
• Extensive knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator
• Great oral and written communication skills
• Ability to thrive in a startup environment

Bonus Points For

• Experience with drafting paper prototypes
• Experience conducting usability tests
• Previous work with social networks
• Ability to conduct A/B tests and iterate on optimizing user flows
• Mobile design experience
• Experience with PHP & MySQL
• Passion for sustainability and/or transportation

Software Engineer

About You

You love nothing more than developing web applications and writing clean and efficient code. You have a mind for both product and user experience, have great communication skills, and enjoy working with a tight-knit development team. You are a generalist who learns quickly and on the fly and who can easily adapt to a wide variety of programming challenges. You are as comfortable optimizing a MySQL query as you are getting CSS to work in IE6. You either have experience with or are excited to learn all parts of our stack: PHP, Smarty templates, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Google Maps API, and Facebook Platform.

Your Responsibilities

• Design and implement features that help improve the Zimride user experience
• Optimize code for speed and reliability
• Brainstorm ideas with the team and help shape the product roadmap

You Must Have

• B.S., M.S., or PhD. in Computer Science or equivalent
• Experience with, or ability to quickly learn, object-oriented PHP programming
• Experience working with relational databases
• Great oral and written communication skills
• Ability to thrive in a startup environment

Bonus Points For

• Experience with MySQL query optimization
• Experience working with the Facebook Platform and Google Maps API
• Experience with mobile development
• Previous work with social networks
• Contributions to open source projects
• Passion for sustainability and/or transportation

Programming Challenge (Optional)

Calculate the detour distance between two different rides. Given four lattitude / longitude pairs, where driver one is traveling from point A to point B and driver two is traveling from point C to point D, write a function (in your language of choice) to calculate the shorter of the detour distances the drivers would need to take to pick-up and drop-off the other driver.

Account Manager

The Position

We are seeking an aspiring account services representative who will ensure successful renewals of Zimride’s private rideshare community. You will be guiding clients through deployments and a promotion strategy to build a critical mass of Zimriders (10 - 20% of each campus) in as little as 6 months.

Responsibilities Will Include

• Manage 50 or more clients through our partner outreach strategy:
  • Initiate coordinated launches for new clients
  • Organize school-wide and student group emails
  • Manage campus reps (used at some of our client locations)
• Conduct bi-weekly customer calls to discuss campus outreach strategies/tasks
• Hit defined user metrics for client communities each semester
• Maintain Zimride’s high level of customer service to drive 100% client renewals
• Provide input on marketing materials/messaging
• Upsell new services to existing clients

Qualifications

• 1-2 years of account management experience
• Experience in providing positive and friendly customer service over the phone
• Success managing multiple clients at different stages in their development
• Able to strive in a startup environment – moves quickly, thinks strategically and is good at tactical execution
• Excellent organizational, presentation, and communication skills (verbal & written)
• Demonstrated ability to deal with change and be a team player

Compensation will be competitive, performance-based and will include equity.

Sales Representative

The Position

We are seeking an aspiring sales performer to help expand our customer base within the University market in North America. Your initial assignment will be to focus on pipeline development and lead generation activities. Successful candidates can expect to be assigned a territory within 3-6 months, which may require occasional travel time.

Responsibilities Will Include

• Outbound Lead Generation and Territory Development
• Arranging meetings with qualified key stakeholders
• Participating in presenting and positioning Zimride to prospects
• Ultimately, end to end responsibility to manage the entire sales cycle from inception to closure within your own assigned territory

Qualifications

• 1-2 years of sales performance
• Experience making introductory and open-ended discovery calls
• Excited to work with multiple buyers in a single sale (experience preferred)
• Ability to prioritize activities, perform research, and position products within the context of that research
• Excellent organization, presentation, and communication skills (verbal & written)
• Demonstrated ability to deal with change and be a team player
• College degree required

Compensation will be competitive, performance-based and will include equity.