Here's the tl;dr version of why working for us is awesome:

• Our large, well furnished office is in South Melbourne and is near the excellent cafés of Bay St and only a couple of minutes walk from the 109 tram
• We believe in giving everyone the opportunity to learn and develop. We regularly send our staff to camps, conferences and training relevant to their role
• We're a small team, and you'll have direct input into your area of the business and a great career growth plan
• We're profitable, stable and well-funded

Technologies

Here at Marketplacer we use technologies that are robust and reliable. We are not afraid of trialling new methods and integrating them if they work well.

Development

The Marketplacer platform is a single application built with Ruby on Rails 5 and React. It uses MySQL, Elasticsearch, memcached and Redis.

We prioritise rapid, stable development by relying on modern yet battle-tested technologies. It's important for us that any developer can keep the application architecture in their head and feel capable of working in any part of the code base.

Any developer can deploy the application to production, as long as our comprehensive suite of integration tests passes. We optimise our CI infrastructure and deployment processes to make this seamless: both take less than five minutes each to complete.

Operations

We use AWS to host the Marketplacer platform. Right now, we're transitioning from a more traditional dedicated server-based hosting solution to a modern, scalable cloud based architecture. As such we're only using a fraction of the services that AWS offers. Chef and Terraform are used to provision our environments and we run Ubuntu Linux 16.04 for all nodes.

Development and test infrastructure is as important to us as production infrastructure. We recognise that a staging server being unavailable or CI running slowly can be extremely annoying and kill productivity.

We embrace DevOps and SRE principles at Marketplacer. Our Operations Working Group consists of developers with an interest and experience with systems administration who take on operations tasks and participate in the pager rotation.

As we've focused on simple, understandable solutions at Marketplacer, out-of-hours pager incidents are *extremely* rare.

 

Office and Location

Our office is spacious and well-lit with significant amounts of natural light. Our 100mbps fibre connection means you'll always be able to access the internet. The Marketplacer office is at 136 Buckhurst Street, South Melbourne. To get here, you can:

• take the 109 tram and get off at Montague Street - we're just around the corner
• take the 96 tram to Clarendon Street Junction, and walk 10 minutes along the bike/pedestrian path
• walk 20 minutes from Southern Cross station
• drive and utilise cheap all-day on-street parking

There are several great cafés, bars, and restaurants within five minutes walk of our office, and the excellent Bay Street and South Melbourne Market less than kilometer away.

Team Structure

At time of writing the Marketplacer Platform Team includes approximately 25 staff: developers, designers, QA, support and management. Designers & developers are split in to three teams, each accountable for a specific project or deliverable on the platform. Business as usual & operations tasks are then split evenly between the three teams.

Remote Work

Marketplacer allows for part-time remote work and flexible schedules. Every Thursday is optional work-from-home day and several employees also work from home on other days of the week.

Hack days

Every month, on a Friday, we will have a Hack Day. On this day all team members get to work on something new and different. The idea is to explore your interests. All the better if it is a contribution of a feature to the smooth running of the office.

Some examples of hack day projects that we use every day:

• Sonos bot: Queues music on the Sonos, shows what is playing, and lets you skip songs
• Tram bot: Checks the next three 109 trams heading to the city from Montague Street stop

Things that make us happy

We are strong believers in Developer Happiness: this applies to all members of the team. Therefore, the Marketplacer office has the following:

• Nintendo Wii U, which has a loyal lunch time and after work following of a Mario Kart game or two
• Bi-weekly fresh fruit delivery
• SodaStream
• Beanbags and Sofa - for the perfect work-from-home feel in the office
• Office dogs - yes, plural, dogs. A few of the team members have fur babies they occasionally bring to work, usually on Fridays
• Coffee - See Coffee section below

Coffee

There are a lot of coffee enthusiasts in the office, so Coffee gets its own section. Coffee is the most important time of the day for most. There are a few good cafés in the area, but for those who like to make their own, we supply the following:

• Kalita wave 185 - Brews 2-3 cups
• Moccamaster - Brews 4 cups
• Market Lane Coffee - Fortnightly subscription
• Sensory Lab - Fortnightly subscription

Sponsorships

Marketplacer are proud sponsors of the monthly MelbCSS and Ruby and Rails Melbourne meetups.