Senior Web Applications Engineer

SendGrid is looking for a senior backend engineer that can help us manage and innovate our web applications.

Responsibilities:

• Manage a team of web developers and be responsible for getting applications released on time
• Design scalable and fast web applications
• Work closely with designer to develop great UX/UI applications
• Work closely with infrastructure engineer to make sure web applications scale on demand
• Implement backend and frontend web applications in Symfony/PHP to automate tasks and to better present data to users

Qualifications

• Experience managing a team of remote developers
• Experience with management tools such as Basecamp or Pivotal Tracker
• Experience with Symfony, YUI, and test-driven development
• Familiar with UX design
• Plus if familiar with Hadoop and Perl
• Telecommuting will be considered for the right candidate

Senior Backend Engineer

SendGrid is looking for a senior engineer that wants to be part of the team that develops the fastest and most scalable cloud-based email platform in the world.  If you know what a context switch is and the difference between epoll() vs select() we want to talk to you.

Responsibilities:

• Profile and benchmark OS and applications to find and improve bottlenecks
• Implement distributed applications that can scale to millions of emails per day
• Implement applications to provide better tools and insight on email delivery
• Work closely with web developers to develop great user tools
• Enjoy supporting users on technical issues as they are our biggest asset

Qualifications

• Fluent in Perl, Python, and C
• Linux systems administration experience
• Experience developing large scale and mission critical applications
• Familiar with spam filters
• Familiar with an asynchronous programming frameworks such as AnyEvent, POE, or Twisted
• Plus if familiar with Hadoop and statistical analysis
• Telecommuting will be considered for the right candidate

Please emails us your resume at jobs@sendgrid.com and be part of a great team.

The first missed opportunity is communicating with users.  Companies such as Posterous, Wordpress, Intense Debate, and Facebook have taken advantage of the wide adoption of email to develop great applications.  Wordpress and Posterous allow users to write and publish a blog post by just sending an email.  In the same manner, Facebook and Intense Debate allow users to reply to comments by just replying to an email.

The second missed opportunity is increasing email deliverability.  Webmail email providers such as Yahoo and Gmail automatically add email addresses that users reply to often to their contacts list.  Messages from senders in the contacts list won’t be marked as spam in most cases.  The best way to start is to allow registered users to reply to emails to confirm their email accounts in addition to providing a confirmation link.

So why haven’t companies taken advantage of this in the past?  First, it is difficult to setup the infrastructure to handle this.  It requires setting up email server software, worrying about scalability, and maintenance.  Second, parsing emails correctly can be difficult.  Emails are encoded differently, have multiple parts, languages, etc.  Luckily, SendGrid makes all these pains go away.

Companies using SendGrid can get this functionality in minutes.  SendGrid acts as an email proxy to web applications.   Users just point a domain such as domainmail.com or a subdomain such as mail.domain.com’s MX record to our cluster  mx.sendgrid.net and give us a URL to post parsed emails to.   Any email sent to that domain/subdomain comes to SendGrid, we parse it (including attachements), and post it to a web application.  This allows programmers to develop regular web forms that are exactly the same as if they were taking user input from a web browser.  Companies can give unique email addresses to their users or use the same email address and include an unique identifier in the subject (such as ZenDesk) or in the body.  For more information go here.

If you are a SendGrid user using this feature please let us know so we see what cool applications you have developed.  We would love to feature them in our blog.  Also, we would love if you can provide feedback by taking our survey here.

Content test

After some research we found the following on the SpamAssassin’s website:

Versions of the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule released with versions of Apache SpamAssassin 3.2.0 thru 3.2.5 will trigger on most mail with a Date header that includes the year 2010 or later.  The rule will add a score of up to 3.6 towards the spam classification of all email.

The default threshold for SpamAssassin to consider an email as SPAM is 5.0.  Unfortunately, it is easy for SpamAssassin to give some messages a score of at least 1.4 so a lot messages were being marked as SPAM.  We have updated our SpamAssassin rules but expect ISPs that rely on SpamAssassin that have not updated their rules to give a lot of false positives.  We encourage systems administrators to update their rules ASAP.

Once we work out some interface issues, we will be releasing the tool shown above to all users so they can also see this data and run tests on-demand.  This will allow users to test their email content before deploying it into production and/or get notifications when an issue occurs.  This is one of the many features and integrations we are working on that will provide better insight on email deliverability to SendGrid’s users.

SendGrid is still looking for talented individuals to grow its team so please checkout our jobs page http://sendgrid.com/jobs.html and apply if you are the right fit.

SendGrid allows companies to tag each of their emails and assign them a category.  After this, SendGrid will track emails sent, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam reports, and bounces per category.  Companies using SendGrid will now be able to see what types of emails generate more complaints, higher click-though rates, or what emails generate more interest.  For more information on how to accomplish this and for a video on how easy it is to get started and how the statistics look please go here.

Stay tuned for updates from our blog from time to time!