Where we’re at right now

Olark has been trail blazing in real-time customer service for the last 3 years - you’ve probably seen our chat window in the bottom right corner of many other websites. Behind our humble Olark box is a powerful idea: when businesses on the Internet give their customers a direct line to build a relationship, amazing things can happen.

We have a fantastic customer base that is growing at a solid clip. Our problems range from timely delivery of millions of chat messages per week to making a beautiful user experience in both browsers and instant message clients.

Our Culture

We’re a close team who work out of our offices in a large Victorian in downtown Palo Alto with a remote office in Ann Arbor, Michigan and an employee in Virginia. We are bootstrapped, profitable, & proud, and highly value self-direction and independent thinking. Our entire founding team is second time entrepreneurs; we love to teach and also value your past experiences you would bring to the team.

For work…

• show up in jeans and sandals
• work on our office, front porch, or…work from your goat farm (no KIDding!)
• use a standing desk, sit on an Aeron chair, or use yoga ball, your choice
• get stuff done - we only have one scheduled planning meeting per week
• love our customers
• make products that are usable, beautiful, and robust

For fun…

• chill and grill on our back porch
• toss a disc around for an occasional evening “frisbee meeting”
• climb our backyard redwood tree

We are trying to solve significant challenges

• How can we build products that scale personal interactions from a single founder out to hundreds of employees?
• How can we design an elegant chat box that is resilient to overriding factors in the host HTML and CSS?
• How should we integrate robust socket abstractions that avoid Flash fallbacks and still look reasonable to the end-user?
• How can we build a storage interface that allows fast browser state retrieval, while providing good options for backend persistence?
• How can we effectively monitor performance and browser compatibilty across hundreds of thousands of chats per day?

What we expect from you

• you have some cool open source contributions or personal projects that we can take a look at
• you have done battle in Javascript and CSS with IE6, FF3, Opera, and others…and emerged victorious
• you enjoy talking to directly to customers

Can you tell us what could go wrong with this snippet of code? Assume that “Widget” is a predefined function object that takes no arguments, and that this code is something we would give somebody else to put in their HTML. Bonus points for writing a better version of this snippet :)

<script type="text/javascript">

function inspectObject(object) {
    for (key in object) {
        console.log("the attribute " + key + " is equal to " + object[key]);
    }
}

var widget = new Widget();
inspectObject(widget);

</script>

What you can expect when working with us

• getting high fives from our customers when you run in to them (this has happened to over half the team)
• an emphasis on learning; we’ll help you attend (and hopefully present) at conferences
• market rate engineering salary, depending on experience and such (in the 60K-100K range)
• equity, we has it
• relocation benefits (or flying you out to get to know the team if you will be working remote)
• team lunch every Friday
• the cachét of being a force for customer happiness across the globe :)