Simplifi is hiring - work from home

On January 13 2014 23:51 Rimstalker wrote:


Hello TL! This is the 2nd round of recruiting we are doing on teamliquid, the thread for the first one can be found here

If you are under 18, we will not be able to contract you. If you are about to turn 18, feel free to apply
Unless you are from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, we are NOT interested in interns

Who are we and what do we do?

Simplifi is a startup from Fort Worth, Texas. http://www.simpli.fi/. We have been growing steadily over the last 3.5 years, and just completed a round of funding.

We do online advertising. We do 'Real Time Bidding'. We do a lot of 'Search Retargeting'. This means that our customers set up campaigns with targeting criteria of their choice and we bid for them on so-called ad exchanges, one banner ad at a time, up to 600 000 times per second. Imagine ebay, with 40 milliseconds between putting the auction online and the ad being sold and displayed.



We are looking for contractors to help us in our day to day campaign work.

Contractors, what does that mean exactly?

You need to be able to legally invoice us on a montly basis. In some countries this requires setting up a company, or it would at least be highly advisable for taxation purposes. You are responsible for your own health cover, there are no paid sick days or holidays. You work x amount of hours in a month, send an invoice of x times your hourly rate, and we pay that.

We currently have contractors from the States, from Germany, Slovakia, England, Australia, Czech Republic, Ireland and Bulgaria, so if you are from those countries, we could probably give you some pointers what you have to do to set up shop.

We communicate via Skype and email and collaborate via google docs and google drive. We try to do regional meetups every couple of months.

Our minimal starting hourly rate is 15 dollars, if you just meet our requirements. For more qualified people, 20 dollars is possible, and if you really impress us and - thanks to your existing online advertising knowledge - we don't have to train you, we'd offer 25. Once you show us how hard-working and efficient you are, the 15 dollars will go up rather quickly.

What are our minimal requirements?

• fluent English
  
• ability to quickly analyze data, quick judgment
  
• ability to handle multiple projects
  
• tech savy
  
• broad knowledge, open minded, detail oriented
  
• work unsupervised
  

What will you do?

absolute entry level:

• run reports, change parameters to make campaigns meet the campaign goals
  
• expand targeting to spend the budgets in full
  
• contribute to building a library of targeting information
  

'senior' level:

• manage clients independently
  
• access to production servers: logfile analysis, database queries, administrative tasks
  
• use of our homegrown reporting engine
  
• design tools to streamline work
  

possible avenues for personal growth:

• Gentoo Linux admin
  
• (P)SQL god. Here is an example of a SQL query one of our senior contractors put together a couple of weeks ago + Show Spoiler +
  select c.id, c.name, ls.name as seg_name, ls.user_count as seg_users,
  c.start_date,c.end_date, c.daily_impression_cap, c.daily_budget,
  round(cast(float8(sum(cst.total_spend)) as numeric),2) as yest_spend,
  round(cast(float8(c.daily_budget - (sum(cst.total_spend))) as numeric),2) as leftover,
  round(cast(float8((sum(cst.total_spend)/c.daily_budget)*100) as numeric),0) as spend_percent,
  sum(cst.impressions) as imps, sum(cst.clicks) as clicks,
  sum(((c.daily_budget/c.max_bid)*1000)/ls.user_count) as needed_imps_per_user
  from campaigns c
  inner join campaign_statuses cs on c.campaign_status_id = cs.id
  inner join companies co on c.company_id = co.id
  inner join campaign_goals cg on c.id = cg.campaign_id
  inner join campaign_types ct on c.campaign_type_id = ct.id
  inner join campaign_stats cst on c.id = cst.campaign_id
  inner join campaign_labels cl on c.id = cl.campaign_id
  inner join labels_seen ls on cl.name = ls.name
  where c.campaign_status_id = 1
  and c.id = 47904
  and c.company_id in ('25','1705','1534')
  and cst.stat_date = 'yesterday'
  and c.campaign_type_id = 3
  group by c.id, c.name, c.start_date,c.end_date, c.daily_impression_cap, c.daily_budget,
  ls.name, ls.user_count
  order by needed_imps_per_user desc;
  
  
• expert for ad-issues (shockwave, macro-expansion, javascript, iframes)
  
• graphic design work
  
• contribute to open-source software we use and customize: nginx, redis, nagios
  
• write, use and deploy shell or ruby (or any other scripting language) scripts
  
• DNS wizard
  

How do I apply?

Send me an up to date CV and something like a cover letter (feel free to ignore any kind of structured approach your culture might have there, I just want you to convince me that it would be worth my time to run you through our tests). matthias_at_simpli.fi

How does the interview process work?

We will select the candidates we want to interview and reach out to them to make appointments. During the appointments, we will throw some tests at you. We will look at the results, choose the ones we think did well, and take it from there.

What is the time frame for this whole operation?

This thread will be sponsored for a week, applications will be accepted during a 10 day period starting today, Monday, the 13th of January. We will need a couple of days to sort through all of them, but will start scheduling appointments for January already. You could start working as early as the first week of February.

Have you played Starcraft?

Yes, I have. We were having a LAN session in my parents' basement the week it came out and played it pretty much non-stop then. I have also played on Bnet and my crowning achievement was beating OgerRod and OgerTob in a 2on2 LT at a LAN. I have never played Starcraft II however. Currently, I am playing (and translating) the Alpha of Grim Dawn, and grinding through Hearthstone.

Any questions you have, feel free to post in this thread, send me a PM, or email me at the email address mentioned above.

FAQ

How many hours do you expect us to work?

On the first round, I stated 'at least 20 hours per week'. However, 90% of part time people have abandoned us again. We are quite willing to do a slow start, that allows you to keep your current job for the time being, but after some weeks, I would expect more or less full time work.

You really don't care where I work from and at what times?

As long as you do your job, I don't care. For the initial couple of weeks, you probably want to work during times where some other contractors are online, so that you can ask questions, but this is the case at least 20 hours per day. The guy who wrote the SQL statement above has been traveling for the last two years. He has to go to some effort to have good enough internet to work (like getting mobile broadband contracts, or switching hotels until he finds one that has a stable connection), but I think that is a price he is quite willing to pay for his endless summer.

This is your second thread, how did the first one go, in the end?

Five people actually started, of which three are still around. The two that dropped out were part time, both students. I will try to get Matteo, Patrick and Maxwell to post here as well.

Can I get some ideas what you are looking for in the applications?

Sure, I posted about that here and here.

It looks interesting, but can you expand on what the job actually entails?
Especially "run reports, change parameters to make campaigns meet the campaign goals" and "expand targeting to spend the budgets in full".

We have a campaign that is advertising for a retirement home in Baxter, Minnesota. The daily budget is 10 dollars. Currently the campaign is set up to target people that have searched on a list of about 2300 related keywords within the last 7 days, and their IP addresses resolve to the following locations:
Minnesota > Baxter
Minnesota > Brainerd
Minnesota > Crosby
Minnesota > Merrifield
Minnesota > Nisswa
Minnesota > Pequot Lakes
Minnesota > Pillager
Ads are displayed up to 3 times in a 12 hour window to them, and we are blocking around 600 domains where we don't want to serve ads on for this campaign.
The client put a click-through-rate goal into our UI of .2, we are currently far from achieving that.
We have about 10 different types of reports available through our UI (hourly, adposition, by exchange, domain, keyword, etc.), and about 30 more through our special reporting engine. The 'factors' from the latter can even be combined (query for geo-information, combined with contextual, timestamp, grouped by browsertype), but that is usually not necessary.

Based on these reports, you edit the campaign to get the click-through-rate closer to that .2 goal. One example would be to remove the keyword 'obits', since it was spending a good portion of the budget without seeing any clicks, or noticing that no clicks are occurring between 3 and 6 am and not serving ads there during that time period.

If the campaign is not spending the full budget, one would use a tool like google adwords, or spyfu to find more keywords to target, or look in our past campaigns (we have more than 50 000) for similar ones for some inspiration

How much time does it take to work one campaign?

Once you know what you are doing, one iteration over an 'easy' campaign would take 5 to 20 minutes. At the beginning, people only work on easy campaigns. Later on, there will still be easy ones, but you would get trickier ones, where the customers have very specific wishes, or where we are actually looking for conversions (people signing up, or buying stuff, or requesting a quote), not just for clicks.