SSi Micro is hiring great hackers. Are you smart, motivated, and interested in working on awesome software optimized for our world-class, unique, and super-cool satellite network? Then come and be a propellerhead at our awesome, small company.
www.ssimicro.com/jobs
We're a little company based in Yellowknife, the capital city of the Northwest Territories. We deliver broadband satellite internet to 61 of the most remote communities on earth, and now that our network's up and running (although we're investing heavily in upgrading it), we're busy building great software for our customers, optimized specifically for our unique network.
Right now, we're building a file sharing webapp called Qfile. (Check it out: http://qfile.ca -- Free 60 day trial!). Why not just use dropbox, you ask? Well, our network is pretty unique: all our traffic is bounced off a satellite, and round-trip latency of ~600ms (which is because of the horrible limitation of the speed of light, which we are constantly working to exceed) means that we have to do things a little differently. SSi is so cool that when we won a government contract to do "time-shifted file transfers", we decided that we /could/ meet our contractual obligations with a few weeks of work/testing, but instead we're building a wicked webapp that brings the functionality to everyone on our network, not just big clients with IT departments.
Yellowknife's not as cold as you think, and the 24-hours-of-daylight summers are not to be missed.
If you're interested and game, we'll make an offer really easy to accept: We'll get and pay for your apartment, a car if you need it, and pay you atop that. We'll do all that for up to three months while you evaluate us and the north, so that it's risk- and hassle-free for you to come to a really great, unique company in an awesome little city.
We're not really a startup, though we are small and dynamic enough that it feels like it. (It also feels like it because we're Daviding the Goliath incumbent telco up here, and we're kicking their slow, lazy, outmoded asses.)
Our founder (and current president and CTO) started off selling Gateway computers to Northern clients from a little shop in a town near the Knife called Fort Providence. Fifteen-odd years later we're pounding out wicked code that runs on our state-of-the-art satellite network. Lots of hard work from lots of smart people made this happen.
Thanks to NAFTA it's relatively easy for citizens of the United States and Mexico to obtain temporary work permits if you have a profession on this list [1] and the credentials to back it up. This includes "Computer System Analyst" and "Engineer".
Sorry for the lateness of this reply. We've hired international hackers before and dealt with the long immigration process. Our philosophy is we'll do whatever's necessary to get great people on board, and as stated in this thread, the TN visa should make hiring Americans easy, though we've never done that. (I have interned at two American companies and that visa process was relatively painless, which bodes well.)
It's really difficult to try to interest people (software people in general) in working way up North here, so we're not too choosy about where they come from or what their background is, so long as they're bright, motivated, and interested in kicking ass. :)
If an American wanted to work long term at your company, is there a path to Canadian citizenship?
By the way, do Canadian companies provide health insurance? I keep hearing how good the government health care is in Canada, I'm curious how employers handle that.
You have to live in Canada as a perm resident for like 3 years to be able to apply for citizenship. They also don't force you to renounce your US citizenship, so you can be a dual-citizen. So far as the US is concerned, recognition of dual-citizenship status is the purview of the State Department (i.e. IIRC, there are no laws about it, so they can choose how they want to treat your dual-citizenship status as a matter of policy or on a case-by-case basis).
www.ssimicro.com/jobs
We're a little company based in Yellowknife, the capital city of the Northwest Territories. We deliver broadband satellite internet to 61 of the most remote communities on earth, and now that our network's up and running (although we're investing heavily in upgrading it), we're busy building great software for our customers, optimized specifically for our unique network.
Right now, we're building a file sharing webapp called Qfile. (Check it out: http://qfile.ca -- Free 60 day trial!). Why not just use dropbox, you ask? Well, our network is pretty unique: all our traffic is bounced off a satellite, and round-trip latency of ~600ms (which is because of the horrible limitation of the speed of light, which we are constantly working to exceed) means that we have to do things a little differently. SSi is so cool that when we won a government contract to do "time-shifted file transfers", we decided that we /could/ meet our contractual obligations with a few weeks of work/testing, but instead we're building a wicked webapp that brings the functionality to everyone on our network, not just big clients with IT departments.
Yellowknife's not as cold as you think, and the 24-hours-of-daylight summers are not to be missed.
If you're interested and game, we'll make an offer really easy to accept: We'll get and pay for your apartment, a car if you need it, and pay you atop that. We'll do all that for up to three months while you evaluate us and the north, so that it's risk- and hassle-free for you to come to a really great, unique company in an awesome little city.
Email: stephenw@ssimicro.com