benblair

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
78
Submissions
20
Member since
Jun 14
VPE @Catalytic. Spent a decade building trading systems before co-founding two startups (Cerro & MarkITx). Learned a lot about how to get product / market fit wrong. Doing a bit better this time around.

Email me at [email protected] or [email protected]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 10 years ago
Catalytic | https://catalytic.com | Chicago, IL | Fulltime ONSITE | $100K - $120+K

We're building Pushbot, a platform to help teams with their recurring business processes. Join a founding team of veteran technologists with $1B+ exits bringing user-centric design, bots, mobility and machine learning to a market dominated by user-antagonistic, top-down solutions.

We're looking for two senior-level engineers:

Lead Chatbot Engineer: lead development of our conversational interface to Pushbot. You will own the conversation engine that allows our customers to chat with Pushbot via email, Slack, HipChat, SMS, WeChat, etc.

Lead Platform Engineer: lead development of our integration platform. You will own the platform that developers (internal and external) will use to connect pushbot to other systems.

Why Catalytic:

* Recently closed a $3M seed round

* Committed pilot customers

* Solving a ubiquitous but unsexy problem in beautiful ways

* Modern stack: Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch and others

* Good docs, extensive test coverage, automated deploys :simple_smile:

* A culture that balances exciting challenging work with your personal time

Here's what to expect from our hiring process: First, I'll email you back within 48 hours. Then we'll have a 30-minute get-to-know-each-other call followed by a 30-minute technical call. Then we'll do a 60-minute remote pair coding session and finally meet the team in person.

https://angel.co/catalytic/jobs or email me [email protected]

Comment · 10 years ago
Senior Chatbot Engineer | https://catalytic.com | Chicago, IL | Fulltime | $100K - $120+K

We’re on a mission to elevate team operations. We are building Pushbot, a platform for business processes. We believe that the time has come to set aside misfit, clunky, and legacy solutions. It’s time to embrace the modern era of cloud computing, conversational UI, bots, mobility, machine learning, and beautifully-designed, user-centric interfaces.

We're looking for a senior-level engineer to lead development of our conversational interface to Pushbot. You will own the conversation engine that allows our customers to chat with Pushbot via email, Slack, HipChat, SMS, WeChat, etc. Your mission will be to ensure that users love interacting with Pushbot using natural, intuitive language. We have a working prototype in place for our pilot customers, so your focus will be on creating a solid foundation for us to build on.

Why Catalytic:

* We're solving a ubiquitous but unsexy problem

* Small team of well-funded technologist veterans w/ exits $1B+

* Team's worked together before

* Modern stack: Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch and others

* Good docs, extensive test coverage, automated deploys :)

https://angel.co/catalytic/jobs/122467-senior-chatbot-engine...

or email me [email protected]

Comment · 10 years ago
Ha, yea. The Chicago region has a lot going for it but there are a few things that are really painful. Cloud tax? Brilliant Idea! Despite that, taxes and the like are modestly-sized constants. They haven't stopped businesses from growing exponentially here and I don't think they're a reason (alone) to relocate. Though there will certainly be edge cases where they add enough friction to prevent positive feedback loops from kicking in.

For Catalytic, we'll live or die based on whether we can quickly find the right colleagues and customers. This region has a lot of both. And there are some very real advantages to starting here (big fish in a little pond, etc) vs SF.

Comment · 10 years ago
Catalytic | Chicago, IL and Naperville, IL ONSITE | Full-Time | http://catalytic.com/

We are a very early stage startup building a b2b product to vastly improve team and business operations. We were founded by engineers with track records of building hugely successful products and businesses. Our CEO Sean Chou built FieldGlass as CTO from founding to a very successful sale to SAP. Our CTO Ravi Singh has built over 300 mobile apps, founded several startups and is an advisor to several prominent VCs. We recently closed a seed round with backing from some of the top VCs in Chicago and the coasts.

Our stack is Node.js in AWS Lambda fronted by API Gateway and CloudFront. We’ve build an automated testing and deployment pipeline around GitHub, CircleCI and Slack. For storage we primarily use DynamoDB, S3 and ElasticSearch. Whether or not you’re already familiar with these or the dozen other services we use, together we’ll make sure you develop a working knowledge of them and eventually a deep expertise.

We're looking for folks who are kind, curious and tenacious and who have a solid understanding of CS fundamentals. Open roles are:

- Conversational NLP Engineer - Senior-level - build our chatbot / conversational UI.

- Backend Node.js Developer - Junior/mid-level - help make sure developers love the platform.

email me (VPE): [email protected]

Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
MarkITx -- Chicago, IL

In just 18 months, we’ve built the world’s largest B2B exchange for buying and selling IT hardware (anything that goes into a datacenter). Our members include some of the world’s premier financial exchanges, trading firms, data centers and cloud providers. We are bringing transparency and trust to a $350B market that is fragmented to hell and dominated by middlemen ripping off enterprises that don’t know the true value of their infrastructure.

We’re hiring for several technical and non-technical roles:

* Senior Engineer - build the beating heart of a commodities exchange in the cloud

* Front-end Developer - build the front-end infrastructure of the exchange

* Mobile Developer - bring consumer-level ease and beauty to datacenter management

* Data Scientist - help refine the predictive Kelley Blue Book of IT

* Technical Writer - help us show how and why commoditization will reshape the industry, speed up innovation, save billions and reduce e-waste

We’ve raised $3.3MM in funding and pay top of market, plus equity. We are not buying eyeballs in hopes of selling them later. We are attacking massive market inefficiencies and generating extremely healthy margins. We are both riding and driving a huge change in the way IT infrastructure is bought, used and sold.

We're pragmatists, not purists. We’ve bought into reality, whatever that might be, not married to our ideas. You'll fit in best if you are as well. We’re seasoned veterans with big wins and big, educational losses under our belts. We try to use the right technology for the job, with familiarity being a tie breaker. We’re not religious about platforms. Some things we use today: Node.js, ElasticSearch, Asgard, Redis and CouchDB and a slew of AWS services.

If any of that sounds interesting, please email me directly at [email protected]

Comment · 13 years ago
Very excited! Anyone else coming from Chicago?
Comment · 13 years ago
Chicago, IL

Help MarkITx[1] build the software systems that will track, value and trade the world’s IT infrastructure. Working side-by-side with our CTO Ben Blair (that's me) and our head of product Shawn Kelly, you’ll design and build a web of distributed systems sitting atop our AWS infrastructure. You'll have full ownership of your projects and the systems you work on. You'll never be micromanaged.

We're looking for engineers who have built, deployed and managed large distributed systems. We're pragmatists, not purists. We try to use the right technology for the job, with familiarity being a tie breaker. Some things we use today: Node.js, ElasticSearch, Redis and CouchDB and a slew of AWS services.

The types of project you might work on:

- An automated market making system for wholesalers

- An inventory import that can identify products in anything from poorly formatted spreadsheets to scanned invoice PDFs to photos of asset tags

- A public-facing API for asset valuation and trading

We Offer:

- Great work environment + generous equipment budget

- Base salary in the $110 - $130k range + significant equity

- Raise to $160 - $180k when we close our Series A

- Benefits including health, dental

About MarkITx

MarkITx is a B2B exchange for buying and selling IT hardware (anything that goes into a datacenter). We are disrupting the $350B secondary IT market by bringing simplicity and transparency to a process that is currently painful, ugly and untrustworthy. We are a well funded startup, working out of 1871. We are a very talented, deeply experienced and tight-knit team. We have some of the best backers and advisors in Chicago. We’ve proven the model, with over $60MM in orders and over $150k per month in transactions. We’re just getting started, and we need your help to scale.

Our culture is driven by a simple constraint: every colleague we add should make the rest of the team happier and better at their own jobs. That means talent density grows as we grow. It means we have zero tolerance for ego-driven BS. It means we’re in awe of what our colleagues are capable of. It means we have complete autonomy to identify and solve the problems in our domain. It means we care more about the win than we do about who did what to get us there.

Email me at [email protected] if you're interested and tell me about what you've built.

[1] https://www.markitx.com

Comment · 13 years ago
Location: Chicago, IL

Position: Software Engineer

Company: MarkITx

MarkITx is looking for talented generalists join our software engineering team. We want colleagues who are smart and get things done, who are inveterate builders, tinkerers and detectives. We hire people not experience levels, so we have a place for you whether you have been building real-time trading systems for a decade, or are fresh out of school.

MarkITx is a B2B exchange for buying and selling IT hardware (anything that goes into a datacenter). We are disrupting the $350B secondary IT market by bringing simplicity and transparency to a process that is currently painful, ugly and untrustworthy. We are a funded startup, working out of 1871. We are a very talented, deeply experienced and tight-knit team. We have some of the best backers and advisors in Chicago. We’ve proven the model, with over $20MM in orders and over $150k per week in transactions, roughly doubling every month. We’re just getting started, and we need your help to scale that.

Building a commodities exchange from scratch is an unique challenge. Working with a world class team of designers, front-end developers and industry experts, you will build the beating heart of our trading platform. You will become an expert in every layer of our stack, including Node.js, ElasticSearch, Redis and AWS. You’ll integrate with dozens of APIs from services like FedEx, Dwolla, Dropbox and NetSuite. You’ll help build and document our own API so that our users can tap directly into the exchange.

If that sounds like fun, see the details at https://www.markitx.com/careers#engineer

Comment · 14 years ago
Ha, most definitely :) Our UI layer is not happy ATM. Hack hack hack...
Comment · 14 years ago
Thanks. You end up creating that feed by the end of the walkthrough, but as you and several others point out, the payout is way too late. Based on all the useful feedback here, I'll add a TL;DR and rework it so that the first thing you see is more along the lines of "here's a feed with the stock prices attached to tweets" --> "See how it's done...".
Comment · 14 years ago
Ah, yea we disabled the functionality that's not explicitly needed for the walk-through. As @tmcw suggests, "sign-up to enable this" would be much more helpful to all concerned than "forbidden". I'll fix that...
Comment · 14 years ago
We've got a short video at http://cerrio.com/. It's pretty rough, but will give you a little more context if you're interested.

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