Oblong Industries is a thriving Los Angeles-based technology firm whose purpose is to redefine the way humans interact with machines. Oblong's flagship product, g-speak, is a gestural computing platform that replaces the three-decades-old mouse and windows HMI with a vastly more capable, expressive, and collaborative approach privileging human hands. The technology first entered popular consciousness via the 2002 film Minority Report, whose scenes of gesturally driven digital systems Oblong designed; but the work extends back to the MIT Media Laboratory in the mid 1990s, where the company's founders began developing several of the crucial research strands that have now been intertwined to form g-speak.
Oblong has installed g-speak systems for clients around the world. At this point in its evolution, the company principally serves enterprise customers. But Oblong's ongoing R&D efforts are designed to repeatedly halve the cost of the technology until commodity pricing, together with an expanding ecosystem of third-party developers, results in the genuine ubiquity of g-speak.
Philosophically, our work is predicated on the idea that fundamental advances can no longer occur as isolated 'pure technology' efforts. And indeed: it's possible for technology to directly, deliberately embody an aesthetic, to manifest design not as thin lacquer but as a foundational ingredient. As the company's vast project encompasses the invention and refinement of new gestural and graphical languages, programming models of newly radical fluidity, interaction models with wholly new foundations, and fine-grained media manipulation built in at the OS level, such aesthetic emodiment is a central—and delightful—preoccupation.
For more information about Oblong (and to see our demo reel), please visit our website at oblong.com.
To apply for any of the jobs listed below, please provide the following three items in an email to jobs@oblong.com :
- A short cover letter describing to us what you think is interesting about the work going on at Oblong, how your background fits with what we're doing, and why you want to work with us.
- A resume in either plain text or pdf format (only plain text or pdf, please)
- We'd like to see a piece of your work. Please include a substantial example of your prose writing, or a link to or bundle of sample code, or a pointer to a mailing list thread in which you submit patches or offer contributions to a project, or a deck of slides, or a link to a portfolio of visual design.
flexibly capable application programmer
Broadly experienced and interested programmer to work in a small-team context developing user-facing applications built on a new gestural/spatial computing platform. The right person for this job has at least a few of the following qualifications:
- fluency in (though perhaps not actual love of) c++ programming
- actual love of programming in general
- five or more years of experience writing code in a professional software development environment
- demonstrated ability to make architecture and feature-set design decisions
- demonstrated ability to explicate and document design and architecture decisions
- demonstrated ability to work well with others and follow a spec where one happens to already exist
- experience designing and implementing user interfaces
- low-level graphics hacking experience (open gl or similar)
- willingness to travel and interact with clients
The primary responsibility for this position is to write code that helps our clients solve big, complex, real-world problems. You might, for example, be working on a suite of visualization and control applications for a huge simulation system.
We try to deliver working code in bite-sized pieces, quickly and iteratively. We spend a lot of time making sure that we're integrating our new applications with our clients' existing legacy infrastructures and tools.
As in most truly interesting jobs, there's a mixture of exciting heavy lifting and bit-by-bit scaffolding. Some days are spent doing radically new design and development work and some days go towards maintenance hacking, glue coding and contextually necessary wheel reinvention.
In this job, you have an opportunity to work at a variety of levels of the software stack. We often find ourselves optimizing low-level algorithms to achieve (say) adequately fast message-passing performance between loosely coupled application components. And then the next day working on solving a UI design problem revolving around strategies for effective presentation of a mixture of 2D and 3D data.
We also refactor, generalize and incorporate into our core platform as much of the application code that we write for clients as possible.
creative javascript/html expert
Responsible for developing and maintaining client-server web interface code for high-end embedded products. The work will first be focused on developing system interfaces and web applications in javascript, html, ruby and possibly c++. These interfaces will allow g-speak programs and web-based clients to be used together in collaborative environments.
You'll have the opportunity to wear a lot of hats, though, working at Oblong. Other critical projects that you can contribute to include: the embedding of browser components into 3D and distributed visualization environments, maintenance and extension of the intranet we use to coordinate work and keep track of what we collectively know, and the design and implementation of a more extensive and community-oriented oblong.com internet panoply.
We ask that you:
- have at least five years experience developing, documenting and shipping production code
- are a self-starter, organized and capable of working well in small teams in an agile environment
- are expert in javascript and actionscript, with experience implementing performance-critical graphics functionality and building maintainable implementations of complex, graphically rich web front-ends
- know HTML, DOM, CSS and JSON like the back of your hand
- are well versed in cross-browser development (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome)
- are experienced developing with Ruby on Rails
If you have c++ development experience, that's a strong plus, too.