C++ developer in Berlin. 130 000 euro per year

Do you believe in beauty when it comes to programming? Do you have a vivid interest in elegant algorithms? Are you fluent in C++? If so, we would like to meet you. Here is what we offer in a nutshell:

A wide array of extremely challenging C++ development tasks
An international team of brilliant minds
A working environment that makes this team stay and grow
Enough time to make sure that every detail of your solution is perfect
A flat organization and plenty of room for your ideas
No scheduled meetings
Family-friendly working hours, no deadlines, no overtime
Support for relocation
A competitive salary from the start and a raise to EUR 130,000 annually after only one year

Tasks

About this job

We are looking for smart, creative developers with a solid theoretical background. You should be able to look at a problem from the user's perspective, discuss abstract concepts with fellow developers, as well as produce an elegant implementation. Developers we have hired in the past mostly hold an exceptional master's degree in computer science or even a doctorate.

At think-cell, we like flat hierarchies. You will work largely independently and will be responsible for the whole range of activities when implementing a new feature. We expect each of our developers to do architecture, design, implementation and bug fixing, rather than splitting these activities between several people. We thus minimize communication losses and put everyone in control of their own work. Your ideas are welcome, even if they mean that we have to change a lot of code to make things better.

We have published several scientific articles in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Graphics and we will encourage you to do the same. We sponsor visits to conferences and have close connections to universities and research institutes in the U.S. and Germany.

think-cell encourages a healthy work-life balance. We do not work at night or on weekends, and support our staff's families with a full-time company nanny. She is available for free when children are sick, or if you just feel like spending an evening out.

We pay very competitive salaries, and offer our developers EUR 130,000 annually following one year of employment. If necessary, we will go out of our way to help you relocate to Berlin, and will do what we can to help you acquire a work permit.

Requirements

About our software

Since 2002, think-cell produces graphics software that performs most of the painstaking work of creating data-driven slides for professional Excel and PowerPoint users. PowerPoint slide creation is one of the most popular things professionals use a computer for. Thus, it is rather surprising that while intelligent software has revolutionized many things we frequently do, such as web search in our browser, or telephone speech recognition in a call center, office productivity software has not changed much over the past decade or so.

think-cell is out to change this. We stand out from the crowd of other presentation software because we are willing to do the leg work of developing sophisticated algorithms and refining our user interface, which makes working with our software so satisfying for our users. Here are some highlights of what we have done.

Algorithmic highlights

We developed a new algorithm for automatic point cloud labeling that allows labels to be positioned away from the actual points.
We developed a new algorithm for automatic column chart labeling.
We are working with John Forrest author of the linear solver CLP to make his simplex code faster on our kind of problems.
We developed quite a few generic data structures that are not in C++ or Boost, for example partitions.

Hacking highlights

To do things that are not possible via the documented Microsoft Office API, we do lots of reverse engineering with the disassembler IDA from Hex-Rays.
We wrote probably the best function hooking engine out there. On each start of our software, we patch the Microsoft Office executables in memory. We search for small chunks of assembly code rather than hard-coding patch addresses to be robust against minor code modifications.
We redirect PowerPoint's and Excel's window contents into offscreen buffers and use Direct3D 9.0 to render our user interface on top.

Other highlights

We fund the working group for programming languages of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN). Some of our employees are members of this committee and vote in the international standardization process of ISO/IEC C++.
We closely track the latest versions of our compilers, Visual C++ and Xcode, so we can always use the latest C++ standard features as soon as they become available.

We use Boost throughout our code, e.g., for most of our parsing needs.
We have our own range library, in the same spirit as or Eric Niebler s range-v3, but going further, for example, by unifying internal and external iteration. We gave a talk about it, and most of the code is public.
We have our own reference-counting and persistence libraries to save and restore whole object trees.
We wrote a parser and writer for the Excel .xls format.
We have an extensive bug reporting infrastructure. Assertions and error checks stay in the release code, and our software automatically reports bugs to our server. The server analyzes the bug, categorizes it and files it in a database that all developers can access. If an update fixes the bug, the user can download the update directly from a bug response web page.