We’re hiring a developer to join our small team at SpatialKey.
About SpatialKey
SpatialKey is a mapping and data visualization product. We think it’s awesome. We create tools that let enterprise customers take large amounts of data they might have about their businesses and turn it into information they can use. We’ve been involved in a number of industries, from law enforcement to human rights work, but we have most recently turned our attention to focus on the insurance market (yes, that’s a “pivot” in startup-speak). Check out the progress we’ve made in the insurance market in the last 12 months in our year in review blog post.
About the job
You will develop mapping and data visualization apps for the insurance market. Part of your time will be doing custom client work and part of your time will be doing in-house product development work for SpatialKey (mostly still focused on insurance). For the client work you’ll need to work directly with clients to help define project requirements; you’ll be involved in every phase of the project, from planning all the way through the coding and delivery. You’ll also be working with a dedicated Project Manager, dedicated UX designers, and our lead developer, so you’ll have a support network. Experience consulting or interfacing with clients is helpful. We don’t know what your title will be, if you need it to sound super important like Senior Principal Architect Developer IV or something we can make that happen, but really we’ll introduce you to our clients as “the guy who wrote everything you click.”
And in case you think insurance sounds boring, here are some of the fun apps we’ve worked on in the past 12 months:
an app that calculates flood risk for properties throughout the UK to allow an insurance underwriter to quickly decide whether a property is insurable or not
a terrorism app to find areas where a bomb, if detonated, could produce the most damage to surrounding properties
hurricane forecasting applications that let you play god and drag around hurricanes to instantly see the effect a storm might have if it diverges from its path
Here are few screenshots of some of the apps we built recently:
About the team
We have a small team and we’re incredibly proud of that. We’re currently 3 engineers (2 clientside, 1 serverside), 1 product manager (who’s also a jack of all trades and runs our EC2 infrastructure), 2 user experience designers, and one CEO (who also takes on the bulk of our sales effort and lands us the big deals). We are firm believers in the power of small, focused teams of only the top talent. Staying small, lean, and agile has gotten us where we are, and we plan on keeping things that way.
We’re all remote and we all work from home from 6 different states: CA, TX, NY, NM, CO, MI. We all talk everyday on Skype and we live on IM during the workday. Working remotely has its own set of challenges, and we require someone who can be productive and work autonomously, but who knows the right time to reach out for help.
We’re a small, scrappy startup, but we don’t work ourselves to the bone. We’re the kind of people who are doing this because we love it and it fascinates us. We think about the problems we’re solving while lying in bed before going to sleep. We’re definitely looking for someone who shares that passion. We don’t want you slaving away on Saturdays, but we hope you’re fascinated enough by your work that you can’t help thinking about it in the shower.
About you
We need someone who can take full responsibility for projects. We don’t have enough people to pass the buck. You’ll be in charge of the development effort for projects that our customers are depending on, and we need someone who will own that responsibility.
Flex development – you should have a number of years developing and shipping Flex apps. Everything from custom component development to app architecture to styling and skinning.
Consulting vs product – Consulting experience is a plus, but working on a shipping product is also a plus. An ideal candidate is someone who has shipped a product to paying customers, and also who is comfortable with running a conference call with a client.
Decent eye for UX stuff – if something doesn’t work right you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty and tweak the UX to make it work. We have dedicated UX guys you’ll be working with, but you should be comfortable “filling in the gaps”. That might mean we have wireframes that get you 80% there and you’ll have to use your skills to figure out how to design whatever interactions or screens are missing.
Passion for data – our core mission is to take data and turn it into useful information. That’s a lot harder than it sounds, and it’s harder than churning out pretty infographics. Our ideal candidate loves working with data, whether that’s on a map or in other capacities.
About the technology
SpatialKey, as it is today, is a clientside Flex application. It’s large – a few hundred thousand lines of code. We are built on top of the Flex 3.6 SDK. I can already hear you saying: “But what about Flex 4.6? What about HTML 5?” All good questions, and I’ll be straight with you: we have an existing, impressive app, high paying customers, and difficult (in a fun way) business goals. The best business decision for us is to remain focused on improving our existing codebase, while at the same time starting to experiment on the side with new technologies (mainly Javascript and HTML alternatives to Flash/Flex). You’ll play a key role helping us deliver kick-ass Flex apps, but we’re also going to make sure you can build up our HTML/JS and native mobile app capabilities. You, like all current Flex developers, should be excited to expand your skillset.
How to apply
It’s easy, email us your resume and tell us why you want the job. You can email jobs-at-spatialkey.com. This isn’t a big HR hiring department thing, so speak directly and let us know why you’re a good fit for what we’re looking for. Compensation will be commensurate with experience, but if you’re worried about us meeting your salary requirements please include your required range when applying. Please send examples of the work you’ve done. That can be a public product we can check out, a GitHub repo, a blog with code we can read, etc. We want to see that you’re passionate, you love what you do, and that you’re good at it.
Far and away, 2011 was the biggest year for SpatialKey yet. It’s only fitting that for such a big year we do a quick recap to take stock of the past 12 months.
Insurance Applications
This past year marked a huge push into the insurance market for SpatialKey. We developed a number of applications that help insurance companies prepare for and respond to natural disasters, calculate their exposed risk, optimize their underwriting process, and visualize and understand the core drivers behind their businesses.
In particular, in 2011 we made great progress on our Natural Perils Suite, a series of apps focused around catastrophic natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, flood, and tornados. We launched two hurricane apps, and have apps for earthquake and wildfire nearing completion.
Hurricane Applications
We launched two hurricane applications during the 2011 hurricane season. Our Current Hurricane Forecasts app comes pre-loaded with all the latest hurricane forecasts and pulls updates in realtime as storms develop. We built the app before hurricane season started, and then we were beta testing it live with customers as storms started rolling in. It was incredibly exciting summer. We were writing code, debugging, and pushing out updates to our customers while these hurricanes were developing. We were quite literally racing against hurricane force winds to get updates into our customers hands. And our customers were using SpatialKey for mission critical work to determine how much damage Hurricane Irene was going to cause.
The second hurricane application we built, Past Hurricane Scenarios, lets you take a historic hurricane and run what-if scenarios to determine what would happen if a given hurricane struck today. What would happen if a hurricane like Katrina hit today? Or what if Hurricane Ike hit 50 miles further west?
Videos
Earthquake Tablet Proof of Concept
We got our feet wet with tablet development with a proof of concept for analyzing earthquake damage. Developed for the Blackberry Playbook, this application shows the potential damage caused by an earthquake. SpatialKey gets this important information immediately into the hands (literally) of the people who need it quickly. When you’re on the ground responding to an earthquake you can understand exactly where you need to focus your effort.
Blast Radius App
We made our first foray into the terrorism insurance market by creating a bomb blast application that calculates potential damage for different sized blast zones. This application provides the tools an underwriter needs to figure out if insuring a new property would put them at too much risk for a terrorist attack.
CoreLogic Risk Score Underwriting App
We partnered with CoreLogic to integrate complex risk analysis directly into an underwriter’s workflow. Underwriters can instantly access risk scores for hazards such as storm surge, earthquakes, sinkholes, and damaging winds. Risk maps show you the distribution of risk for different hazards geographically, which gives you the context you need to establish whether a particular property is a high or low risk and how it impacts your accumulated risk in a particular area.
Video
Guardian Crime Mapping
We kicked off the year with a custom app developed for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The custom application, which was built on top of the SpatialKey Platform, performs crime comparisons between different crime types and different cities in the UK, delivering powerful and intuitive analysis straight into the hands of the public.
At a glance, citizens can see how their city stacks up against crime rates in neighboring areas and they can easily pinpoint dangerous densities of crimes like burglary or violent assaults near their homes. Nearly a half million crime incidents across the entire country are available for instant analysis.
Salesforce
In the summer we launched SpatialKey on Salesforce. We teamed up with Arrowpointe, the provider of a great mapping product called Geopointe, which is the highest rated mapping application on the Salesforce platform. SpatialKey is offered to Geopointe customers for advanced mapping and analytics.
Video
SpatialKey Features
And as always we’ve continued to improve the core SpatialKey platform with new features throughout the year. We listened to what our customers were asking for and focused on 3 main areas: core mapping capabilities, an improved user experience, and more powerful filtering capabilities. For a full list of SpatialKey improvements you can always check our release notes and what’s new pages.
Beefing up our mapping capabilities
We added a number of features to meet the needs of our cartophile customers. We added point mapping, a map legend, the ability to add map markers, and labeling of your maps.
Distance and elevation tools
In the insurance market, knowing the distance to the coast or the elevation of a particular property can be incredibly important. We added tools to SpatialKey that will quickly calculate elevation and distances between points.
Focus on the user experience
We pride ourselves on having one of the easiest-to-use tools on the market, but we’re never satisfied. We’re constantly trying to improve the overall user experience to make everything simpler, easier, and faster. Through a series of user tests and customer visits we identified some key areas that we improved. We added a better layer manager for our customers who work with many map layers, we improved the overall visualization pod workflow, we improved the main home-screen user interface to make it easier to find the data you use the most, and we integrated SpatialKey Apps.
Improved filtering capabilities
We also added some key filtering capabilities to let you drill down into your data. We added synchronized filters, a powerful feature to keep datasets synchronized as you filter in SpatialKey, and we also added an improved radius search to let you quickly search around an address.
On to 2012!
We’re excited about what 2012 has in store for SpatialKey. We have a number of projects in the works, and every indication is that 2012 will be an even bigger year for our product and our company. We’ll be putting together a roadmap blog post that will cover our plan for 2012, so look for that soon.
With SpatialKey risk managers or operations executives responsible for multiple locations nationwide or regionally can quickly assess an event like this tropical storm.
Tropical storm Lee is making landfall in Louisiana as we speak. And as it happens, this event is unfolding on a Saturday. With With SpatialKey, a risk manager can quickly get an operational picture of this event and how it may impact locations of interest. She can do it right from a laptop at home. And she doesn’t need to call in a GIS specialist to prepare anything for her- she can do all of this on demand, based on the latest forecast data.
Here’s a video that shows just how simple it is…
In addition to being so easy to access and use, it’s easy to get started. We can have your organization up and running in minutes. Please contact us for more information about our solutions for insurance and risk management.
Irene made landfall in North Carolina early this morning, and NOAA updates continue to stream into SpatialKey’s Hurricane Forecast App. The app allows insurers to analyze the latest hurricane forecast data in context with their exposures, without any support from IT, and without waiting in a queue of requests. We think it’s truly changing how insurers can operate during events like this- and we’re getting the same feedback from our early customers.
We’ve been tracking a sample insurance portfolio using the Hurricane Forecast App as Irene formed. On Thursday, two days ago, we reported that our forecasted exposure (in terms of total locations in the 50 knot windband) rose from 984 locations to 6,154 based on the updated NOAA forecasts, with total insured value rising from $152M to $1.6B.
Our forecasted exposure looks relatively similar to Thursday’s report: There are now 6,690 insured locations in the 50 knot band (either historical or forecasted) representing $1.7B in total insured value:
We can also now get a better sense of our insured locations in the 64 knot band, as forecasted by NOAA:
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