Mapquest Vibe - <a href="http://mqvibe.mapquest.com" >http://mqvibe.mapquest.com</a>
Denver, CO - Fulltime.
Mapquest is hiring engineers to work on a new product, Mapquest Vibe. Vibe was just released at SxSW and we have a lot of work to do before we can strip the "beta" label off. If Mapquest answers the question "How do I get from A to B", Vibe answers the question "Where do I want to go?" Using Vibe, you can see at a glance where the best businesses are in any neighborhood - our goal is that it will help users feel like a "local" wherever they wind up.
You'll have a lot of autonomy in terms of how you implement features as well as input into the product direction itself. Projects I've implemented are a semantic tagging system to help categorize businesses, a dynamic geographic buffer to allow for fuzzy location searching, and I'm currently implementing a new API intended for public consumption. It's a very empowering culture and a great place to work.
We're hiring across the board. Front-end folks use backbone.js, jQuery and a few mapping-specific toolkits to do various things. Back-end folks use a mixture of Java (running on Play!) and Groovy talking to a Postgres DB. Right now we're doing mobile development for the iPhone, with an Android app on the horizon. Experience matters less than ability - we'd be just as happy interviewing a grad right out of school as we would be interviewing a grizzled vet with 40 years experience. Skills I would particularly like to see added to the team are knowledge of Hadoop and Lucene, but that's my own personal wish-list.
If you're interested, shoot me an e-mail (it's in my profile).