Front End Programmer: Dynamic Interaction Design and Visualization
Company Overview
Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, GNS Healthcare is a predictive analytics company whose math and machine learning technologies derive causality – not just correlation – from mountains of health data. Where other companies describe the statistical ‘what’, our platform delivers the underlying explanation of ‘why’, if A and B, but not C and D happen, then X (for instance, a stroke) will happen. This enables intelligent interventions that save and improve lives and cut medical costs. By learning causal models directly from data, we quickly and more precisely discover what treatments work for whom.
GNS is helping healthcare leaders discover the knowledge they need to match patients with treatments that work. Our analytics solutions are being applied across healthcare: from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to payers, integrated delivery systems, and accountable care organizations (ACOs).
Corporate Culture
We are passionate about our work and believe that by creating evidence-at-scale, we can help transform healthcare. We look for curiosity, passion, drive and resiliency and value creative intelligence, open teamwork and dedication.
Most of all, we are looking for people who want their talents to make a difference in the real world, vs. designing the next hip app or launching the next “meme.” All the talent and energy under our roof goes into products that help real people avoid a medical emergency, or the emotional and financial stress of chronic disease. Our end-users’ ability to grok “big data” impacts life, death, health and financial solvency for thousands of individuals and families. That’s why our engineering, math and design needs to be insanely great.
Job Description
We are looking for an experienced front-end application programmer who is a master of making information manipulable, not just viewable. You are adept at creating integrated dynamic views and controllers (an interaction in one frame changes the view in another, highlighting an item on one part of the screen triggers queries that change the overall picture), and programming elegant ways to raise the signal-to-noise ratio in a complex information space. If the elegant solution means context-dependent controls, animated overlays, or taking advantage of the graphics chip in a tablet device, you should be comfortable, as a programmer, implementing that. But you are also on guard against “design for its own sake.” When end-user interactions have real world consequences, every affordance needs to pull its weight.
You have
• Extensive experience with JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, and iOS (including tablet and mobile).
• Extensive software development experience building complex web applications in a variety of languages. Experience with functional programming and Python is a plus. Experience with (and fond memories of) Processing is a plus.
• Experience working with “big data” and the APIs and middleware that make it possible to render, manipulate, and interact with large volumes of data through a front-end interface. The more (and more troublesome) APIs you’ve worked with, the better. We need to see you’re adept with data interfaces: Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, National Weather Service, U.S. Census, the bigger the better. What would really put you over the top: creating front end interactions driven by large volumes of data that moves fast: financial data, e-commerce, logistics, Twitter. If you can drink from a fire hose to give an end-user a clear sense of what’s happening, and why it matters, you’re our kind of awesome. Likewise, if you’ve made complicated information usable: highly nested health data, XBRL, high-volume ontologies-from-hell, etc.
• Experience with Agile methodologies, e.g. Scrum or extreme programming. Strong focus on automated testing and deployment. Experience with DevOps a plus.
• Curiosity and passion for the end-user experience: You want to push technical boundaries, find clever hacks, and learn how an epidemiologist or an actuary sees the world. You want to give the people arguing “if we spend some money over here, 14,544 people don’t go into diabetic shock there,” an interactive way to tell that story that’s going to rock their boss’s world.
• A portfolio of projects you can show and talk about – we want to see stuff you’ve actually programmed, and hear about what made it challenging, fun, what you learned and what you’d do differently. Send URLs.
GNS offers competitive salaries, vacation, stock options, health and dental insurance, long-term disability and a 401(k) plan.
Contact: JC Herz, Director of Product Strategy and Design – jc@gnshealthcare.com