Narrative is building the first global data marketplace. It has often been said that data is the new currency. Unfortunately, maximizing the value of data is often easier said than done. On one side, transacting via individual point to point integrations carries a lot of overhead in both business development and technical integration efforts. On the other, going through big aggregators introduces opacity in the pricing and provenance of the data. At Narrative, we help our customers get value from their data by building a central auction platform to reduce the friction and tooling to increase the transparency in this process.

We are a small, early stage team looking for great developers who want to jump in and take major systems and user-facing features from design to launch. Here’s where we are now:

We are operating in Amazon Web Services. Our services are mainly deployed on EC2 provisioned with Terraform.

We also heavily use other technology on AWS such as DynamoDB, S3, and RDS.

Our backend includes a data ingestion web service with supporting Kinesis consumers, along with a growing array of Spark projects. It’s written mostly in Scala, with a smattering of Python for lambda functions.

We sit somewhere in the middle of the “Scala as a worse Haskell” and “Scala as a better Java” spectrum. We love functional programming and we do make use of libraries like cats, but at the same time we heavily favor core language features and have no intention of rewriting everything using Free Monads.

Our web app UI is written in Typescript with Angular2 and a supporting API running on Node, and is deployed and monitored using much the same supporting tech as the backend.

Other services we use include: GitHub, CircleCI, DataDog.

Here are some examples of projects that we would like some help with:

Interactive tools to help buyers discover the data they need to accomplish their business objectives.

Interactive tools to help sellers maximize the yield from the data that they are selling.

Data analytics pipelines to drive the interactive report UIs. For example: reports for yield forecasting and deal pre-qualification.

The ideal candidate should:

Have experience building modern web applications using Javascript, HTML, and CSS.

Be able to debug various aspects of web application code, such as cross-browser Javascript quirks.

Thoroughly understand the HTTP lifecycle and how the browser interacts with web APIs.

Enjoy building fast, user-friendly UIs.

Not be afraid of contributing to the entire stack when the need arises, given that frontend doesn’t simply mean HTML/CSS. For instance, a feature might require

some metrics to be computed from a Spark Report

creating a MySQL migration script

tweaking S3 permissions and terraform scripts for deployment

We are not looking for a 100% fit on all the technology buzzwords, but we are looking for someone with strong technical skills who is eager to pick up new technologies as necessary.

We are building the team with a remote-first mindset, and as a result every team member is expected to have an ability to synthesize business requirements, distill the domain, contribute to high-level design documents, efficiently communicate asynchronously, and more generally work autonomously toward a shared vision.

Continuously investing in quality (code quality, tests, pull request reviews, refactoring…) is part of our strategy to sustainably maximize the business value we deliver.

Apply at [email protected]

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