At the last Do it with Drupal, Michael Meyers shared some of the details of the Examiner.com plan to migrate from the current coldfusion footing to Drupal. The project is being developed in Drupal 7 with the intent of helping move needed contributed modules and core to a final release rapidly in 2010. Clarity Digital Group owns and operates Examiner.com (the source for local news and information in North America). Clarity Digital Group is migrating Examiner.com, a top 60 website to Drupal 7 using NowPublic.com as a model. This will create one of the largest Drupal sites. The team is still being actively grown and includes:

• chx
• nagba
• Morbus Iff
• kkaefer
• Pasqualle
• litwol

Front-end position

As a User Interface Engineer, you will be involved in all phases of UI development from requirement analysis through design, development, testing, final delivery and maintenance. You will interact with the entire team from Product Managers to Designers and Developers, as well as End Users to provide ongoing improvements to the user experience, performance, and maintainability of the site. You are responsible for translating visual designs into standards-compliant and performant web pages using the latest front web technologies with pixel perfect attention to detail and integrating these components with our Drupal based platform. You will be relied upon as the guru or go to person for all things front end, so this position requires mastery of rich internet application development techniques, and the desire to evangelize best practices to our team of software engineers. Beyond your technical skills, you need to possess a keen eye for IA, design, and usability. You need to be a strong conceptual thinker and creative problem solver who understands and can articulate what makes sites successful along with the skills and self-starter attitude that will enable you to hit the ground running and start contributing right away.

Back-end position

As a Developer, you will also be responsible for participating in the design, development, implementation, testing, quality assurance, and maintenance of all layers and aspects of our products and systems. This position has significant hands-on coding responsibilities, and requires a strong background in computer science and web development with knowledge of the full software development life cycle. The position additionally requires an individual capable of forward-thinking particularly with respect to performance and scaling requirements. Experience with large scale websites and migrating legacy content management systems to Drupal would be an advantage, as would experience working with C++.

Responsibilities

• Help collaborate on and develop comprehensive functional specifications and work estimates based on these specifications.
• Work with the development and product teams to design, develop and test applications according to specifications.
• Contribute creative ideas to the product development pipeline.
• Support and troubleshoot systems as required, optimizing performance, resolving production problems, and providing timely status updates.
• Help develop and maintain coding standards and best practices, and provide suggestions for application and process improvement.
• Use the NowPublic web site, tools, and systems on a regular basis, contributing to the community and providing feedback on the workflow and processes.
• Other duties as assigned.

Experience:

• This position requires strong problem-solving skills and a strong working knowledge of web technologies, in particular web 2.0-type applications.
• Experience building highly scalable / performance optimized code a strong plus.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Exceptional creative problem solving and analysis capabilities
• Ability to work under tight schedules across multiple projects simultaneously.
• We are looking to build a team with complementary skills, so you need not be an expert in all web technologies, but you must have extensive experience with the following technologies: PHP, (My)SQL and have experience with some of the following: Drupal, JavaScript, JQuery, Firefox extensions (XUL), SVN, Web Analytics / Statistics, AJAX, (X)HTML, CSS, C++

Do you know a rockstar Drupal developer or themer? Do YOU fit this description? Interested in joining this incredible effort? Send an email to jobs [at] examiner [dot] com.