This Week in Jobs: Bear with us

Editor’s note: Every week we ship an email newsletter featuring the region’s most exciting career opportunities. We’ve lovingly called it This Week in Jobs (aka TWIJ — “twidge.”). Below is this week’s edition. Here’s the last one we published; it’s meant to live in your inbox. Sign up for the newsletter here.

For Your Next Hire

If you have a nontraditional office and don’t mind stocking insects, plants and the occasional dead animal next to the draft kombucha in the kitchen, you might consider hiring a sloth bear.

Researchers at the National Zoo have discovered the bears are smarter than plenty of folks gave them credit for. Resident sloth bears Remi and Niko reportedly recognized photographs of their favorite food (mealworms, delicious), suggesting “these animals are remarkably intelligent,” a researcher said. Don’t let the name fool you — sloth bears are agile and they don’t need to hibernate, meaning no need for annual leave every winter. And if they seem “messy in appearance,” as the San Diego Zoo puts it, that’s hardly unusual — this is the tech world, after all.

The News

Working on issues ranging from an app-based car wash and detailing service to childcare and breastfeeding support, these are the 20 Baltimore tech companies to watch on Technical.ly’s RealLIST Startups of 2020. The list is limited to companies that are less than three years old, make most of their revenue from a product and haven’t exited or undergone an acquisition — and, within that group, spotlights those that chose the big idea and are chasing it with tenacity. These are the companies we consider most promising, and we’ll be tracking them with added interest all year. And if you’re in the nation’s capital, check out the D.C. RealLIST, featuring a medical-monitoring device, a happy hour database, a satellite startup and more.

XX gonna give to ya — that is, if you’re a women-led, post-revenue business with a need for debt capital. Investor and founder Astrid Scholz launched the XXcelerate Fund to help established but still-growing companies that may need, say, a line of credit to help make that crucial hire or acquisition. But XXcelerate goes beyond financing, too, providing business education and peer support for women entrepreneurs. Scholz talked about her work in the latest episode of “Off the Sidelines” — an investor education podcast produced by us at Technical.ly in partnership with Project Entrepreneur, a program by UBS.

The Big Game may be days old, but NET/WORK, the Super Bowl of job fairs, returns to Baltimore and D.C. next month. On March 4 at The Assembly Room in Baltimore and on March 24 at The Yard in D.C., mingle and network with dozens of tech hiring organizations, plus more than 200 technologists and tech-adjacent professionals. Each event is the biggest celebration of tech jobs in the region; tech and industry leaders, current employees, recent grads, and those eager for career growth in software development, design, engineering, UX, marketing and more are all invited.

Listen up, Loudoun startups: The county’s Economic Development Innovation Challenge is offering $150,000 to local startups that promote “entrepreneurship and business growth.” Four winners will be selected to win innovation grants, with three finalists receiving $25,000 each and the winner receiving the grand prize of $75,000. Applications are due by March 31.

The Jobs

D.C.

• Nava is seeking an Infrastructure Engineer. You’ll join a small team helping to improve and manage all aspects of Nava’s systems, which are deployed on AWS.
• Skylight Corporation, at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how the government serves the public in a digital world, is hiring a Software Engineer.
• Soundway Consulting is looking for a Software Engineer to help engineer, design, develop, integrate, test, and deploy solutions to enhance and modernize existing systems and applications, and facilitate their migration to an enterprise AWS cloud environment.

Maryland

• The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine is hiring a Data Analyst II to support the Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics Department located at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda.
• Boeing Intelligence & Analytics in Annapolis is seeking a Software Developer I to join its top-tier team.
• LS Power in Baltimore is looking for a Software Engineer. Bonus points if you have experience working with large and diverse code bases.

Virginia

• Walmart Labs is hiring Software Engineers — specifically Back-End Developers-Java — of all levels to join its team in Reston.
• Cvent in McLean is hiring a Front End Designer/Developer to join its UX and web team to help build websites for the company’s marketing team.
• The National Electrical Manufacturers Association in Arlington is looking for a Web Applications Developer.
• DivvyCloud, which is building next-generation cloud automation technology, is seeking a Software Engineer in Arlington.

Remote

• Cloudy with a chance of meatballs: OneSecond Delivery, which is creating a food delivery app that uses autonomous drones to deliver the food, is seeking a Remote Unity3D Developer for Flight Simulator.
• The digital health startup Scanslated is hiring a Remote Python Django Developer.
• Crisp is looking for a Remote Back End Software Developer.

The End

Niko and Remi apparently ranked mealworms as their favorite food, followed by prunes, raisins and nuts — oranges and, perhaps understandably, “omnivore kibble” didn’t make the cut. If tech doesn’t work out, there’s always work as a food critic.