About Connect First. Connect First Inc. was founded in 2005 and is a privately held company based in Boulder, Colorado. Geoff Mina and Richard Manulkin founded Connect First as a way to revolutionize the contact center industry around the primary mission of providing exceptional customer experiences and cutting edge technology.  Today we have over 500 clients worldwide and boast a 97% customer retention rate. With the energy of a startup, but stability of an established business, Connect First is on a roll and looking for great people to help us reach the next stage of success.

Connect First offers competitive salaries, comprehensive benefits, high matching 401K, wellness benefits, generous Paid Time Off, and a casual yet demanding and fast-paced work environment. We are a dog friendly company and find time to get outside and enjoy the best of what Boulder has to offer. Our “pay-for-performance” programs healthily reward rock-star achievements and intellect. We also pay for relevant continuing education, conferences, and skills development.

What it’s like to work with us. To understand who, how and why we work, check out our Development Team’s Statement of Values.

• We are a 13-year-old company with a startup culture. We have all the benefits of financial stability that maturity brings and all the energy of the startup environment. Our customer base is diverse; we aren’t dependent on any single customer.
• No egos allowed. We value strong teamwork and strong collaboration.
• We love agile. We do stand ups, retros, and sprint planning. We value process. We also value keeping that process to a minimum and are always looking for ways to optimize the process.
• We all strive to refine our craft and value writing clean, concise, and maintainable code. We like to build simple yet elegant technical solutions that help us become the leader of the market. We fully believe in code ownership; we all own the code, try to take care of it, and care about its quality.
• Our QA engineers are heavily embedded in our development process. QA is not just a position for a button pusher and requires true engineering practices to help maximize our team’s efficiency.
• We are an efficient team. We wear a lot of hats. We like people who can work the full stack, but we do all have our specialties.
• We are self-driven and involved in the design of our product. Our stories are often the business case, and our developers add the technical details. We want developers who know when to ask questions. We don’t see development simply as an "input story; receive code” function but as a constantly evolving process.
• Our product is BIG, and there is lots more to come. We have a web component, but that is just the surface of what we do. There is always something new to learn.
• We work from the office. Our team is the entire company, and it’s hard to be a part of a team when the core producers aren’t present in the office. Working from home is the exception and not the rule. Life happens. When the water heater blows and you are waiting for the plumber, or your kid is sick, or there is a freak 6-foot snowstorm, working from home is fine. The rest of the time we’d really like to get to know you.
• We are all invested in the business. Every employee has stock options, and we want you to care about the success of our organization. We practice transparent accounting. We believe the more we all know about the business’ performance, the better we can all perform.

About the role. We have an immediate opportunity for a Senior Application Engineer to join our Boulder Colorado team. The successful candidate must be highly motivated to help push our platform and front end APIs forward; and have the ability to function well in a fast paced and dynamic organization. This driven Senior Application Engineer would be responsible for designing, developing and implementing new features, and maintaining existing functionality.

Responsibilities.

• Develop, maintain, and document new and existing products.
• Act as a point of escalation for bug fixes and issue resolution.
• Generate requirements, estimates and plans for projects.
• Contribute ideas for the improvement of our software.

Qualifications.

• Five to eight years development experience on products built with Java and/or Java EE.
• Experience developing RESTful web services with Spring.
• Experience developing distributed scalable multithreaded server side applications.
• Experience writing relational database queries (MySQL preferred).
• Experience with Hibernate ORM.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent from a four-year college or university in Computer Science, Information.
• Systems or other related discipline or the equivalent in work experience.
• Comfortable working as an autonomous full stack developer. While this position is focused on the server side of our applications, our developers are often called on to develop for all layers of our application.
• Must be a self-starter, possess excellent time management skills, and be able manage multiple projects simultaneously with minimal supervision.
• Responsible for mentoring junior members of the Development team as opportunities arise to help build knowledge base and execute tasks.
• Ability to generate requirements, estimates and plan for projects.
• Must possess excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Working knowledge of the Linux/Unix command line interface.

Additional skills or background we would be thrilled if you had any experience with:

• Experience with modern JavaScript frameworks: Bootstrap, JQuery, Angular etc.
• Solution implementation in the premise-based or the hosted telecommunications software industry.
• Call Center industry or telecommunication experience.

Application process. Please apply by sending your resume & a cover letter. If you’ve got it, please send along any code samples (just to see your style & problem solving approach), GitHub profile name, and/or any take home tests you’ve recently completed - it’ll give you bonus points in the application process. In your cover letter please tell us: Your favorite or most satisfying experience solving a problem – either personally or professionally. This can be short and sweet. Submissions without this simple little anecdote will be passed to the back.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Connect First Crew