On the Market: Jobs for game developers who want to build ‘serious games’

On the Market is a new column where we highlight noteworthy job openings and the people who are lookin’. Got a submission? Email us and tell us why you belong in the roundup.

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“Unity devs WELCOME!”

That’s not something we usually see in a job posting for a health IT startup. But that’s what it says in Diagnostic Driving’s listing for senior developers, which we spotted on the PhillyDev Slack.
The DreamIt Health startup, a spinout from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, builds software that aims to reduce car accidents in corporate fleets (think: delivery staffers, salespeople). So what’s with the gaming bent?
One of their products is a driving simulator built in gaming engine Unity. It’s basically a “serious game,” as cofounder Venk Kandadai said to us. He works out of University City’s Innovation Center @ 3401, where DreamIt is headquartered.
You’d also work with the game developers from indie gaming studio QuadraTron Games, Zenas Bellace and Christian Plummer, who are part of the Diagnostic Driving team. Email Kandadai at venkkandadai@gmail.com for more info.

While we’re on the topic of making jumps across industries … Jefferson Health, the university and hospital system that’s pushing to reinvent itself as a house of innovation, is hiring for its innovation team (a web developer and an application development specialist) — no healthcare experience necessary.
That’s what Robert Neff, Jefferson’s director of innovation technology solutions and platforms who joined the team this past summer, told us in an interview earlier this month. In fact, they’re kind of looking for people who don’t have a healthcare background.
“We’re more than open to learn from other industries,” Neff said, “because there are number of industries that are ahead and do it better than healthcare does and we want to learn from that.”
In the last year or so, Jefferson has made a number of new hires to their innovation and customer experience team — like former RJMetrics developer Nate Vecchiarelli, who built an award-winning app for visually impaired back when he was a Drexel undergrad, and designer Viraj Patwardhan, who’s now their director of digital consumer experience.

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Ticketleap is hiring developers to work on a new stealth-mode product. Check the listing here. VP of Product Beah Burger-Lenehan tells us there’s a lot of opportunity for leadership in these roles (“Every software engineer at Ticketleap is also a major project owner; no code monkeys!!” she wrote to us). She described the Center City company as “a very stable startup with a high risk tolerance,” so this might be a good gig for someone who wants to work at a startup but isn’t in the place to take on startup risks, like running out of funding.

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On that note, if you’re interested in building a product but also want the stability of a corporation, check out these gigs at Callowhill-based Thomson Reuters, which is working on what looks like a Facebook for banks that aims to prevent terrorist financing (for reals) and money laundering. They’re hiring an API engineer and a QA engineer. You’d work with lead engineer Nick Weingartner, who’s a civic hacker in his spare time.

Relay, the venture-backed secure messaging company founded by Philly tech veterans Paul Raden and Matt Gillin, is doubling its staff to 70 in the next year, hiring software engineers, project managers and sales staff, but here’s what’s more interesting: they’ll be making two major leadership hires in the coming months. They’re looking for a CTO and CFO, said spokeswoman Michelle Musberger. They haven’t started an active search yet, but it can’t hurt to get in their ear early, right? Check out their jobs page here. Here’s a fresh look at Relay’s 8,000-square-foot office in Radnor.

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Wanna help design the city’s new website? Check it out at alpha.phila.gov. The City of Philadelphia is hiring a web designer. It’s a job where, as director of civic technology Aaron Ogle put it, “everything is about the user because in the case of city government, the user is our neighbor.” (If you’re interested in working for the city, they’re also hiring a front-end WordPress developer and a data integration specialist, where you’d be helping “lay the pipes for data,” as Chief Data Officer Tim Wisniewski explained it on PhillyDev Slack.)

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As for who’s looking: Britt Miller, a longtime product manager at Monetate, recently left the Conshohocken tech company and is mulling her next move. She started at Monetate as director of special projects, where she reported to then-CEO David Brussin, and worked on projects across the company, including recruiting, product go-to market and onboarding while the company was in a stage of enormous growth.

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for sending us tips, keep ’em coming. But — please! — make a case for why we should include the job listing.
A few prompting questions: How would you attract a candidate to this job? What’s unique about it? Will the developer be, say, handling a huge amount of data? Using a new type of Javascript framework? Is there someone at the company that a new hire would be excited to work with? Or is there something special about the company that you want to highlight? (Benefits and perks are pretttttty standard at tech jobs, so unless you offer some sort of benefit that’s insanely unique, it probably won’t land you here.)
And if you’re a technologist, are we totally off base here? Let us know what would attract you to a job.