Careers at AbeBooks
About AbeBooks
AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books and a remarkable place to work. Millions of new, used, rare and out-of-print books are offered for sale through the AbeBooks websites from thousands of booksellers around the world. We helped to revolutionize the used book business. AbeBooks became a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. after being acquired in December 2008. Our mission is to help people find and buy any book from any bookseller and our business stretches around the world with six international sites — AbeBooks.com, AbeBooks.co.uk, AbeBooks.de, AbeBooks.fr, AbeBooks.it, and IberLibro.com, as well as ZVAB.com, a marketplace for German books.
AbeBooks.com went live in 1996 and we have been growing ever since. The unique inventory of books for sale from booksellers includes the world's finest antiquarian treasures dating back to the 15th century, countless out-of-print gems, millions of signed books, millions of used copies, a vast selection of college textbooks and new books too.
Working at AbeBooks is challenging and fun. But we only hire the best people and we insist on the highest standards from our employees. Do you have what it takes?
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Our Values
Customer Obsession: We are always thinking about our customers (booksellers as well as book-buyers).
Innovation: Can you take a technology and turn it into something tangible that will benefit our customers?
Bias for Action: We value smart, hard-working employees who get things done.
Ownership: We hire employees who can think and work like owners.
High Hiring Bar: When we look at a candidate's resume, we ask: "Is this person a superstar?"
Frugality: We only spend money on things that matter.
Our Departments
Customer Support
Our unique customer support department features five distinct teams — core customer support (via phone and email), security and trust (fraud fighters), tactical engineering (technical troubleshooters), registration (assisting and vetting new booksellers) and communications (messaging for our customers). We deliver exceptional customer support and insist on the highest standards.
Systems
This vibrant department maintains and develops our websites, including the enterprise level search engine, the proprietary shopping basket and the inventory management/order processing systems that provide a robust experience for our buyers and sellers. The quality assurance team, dedicated to ensuring problem-free technology, resides within this section.
Marketing
This team sells books by finding new customers and retaining existing ones. It is the guardian of the on-site customer experience. A host of channels are used to help booksellers sell more books, including optimization of our sites for the best natural search results on Internet search engines, paid search, affiliate marketing and email as well as public relations and off-line promotions.
Sales and Account Management
Booksellers are the focus of this team, including acquisition and retention as well as account management and seller performance. Our buyers expect high standards from our sellers so monitoring and enforcement of policies are vital day-to-day tasks. This department is also responsible for the tools used by sellers on AbeBooks, such as our inventory management system Homebase.
Product Management
This team ensures the delivery of high quality software and infrastructure products that enhance the AbeBooks' experience for our buyers and sellers. Using 'agile' development methodology, our product managers translate customer and business needs into tangible tasks for our engineers. Excellence in planning and execution are key requirements for our product managers.
Finance, Administration & Human Resources
Our finance functions are wide-ranging including planning, reporting and recording revenues. This section also controls the movement of money related to day-to-day book sales. The administration team handles payroll, benefits, facilities management and office admin support. Our human resources specialists manage recruitment and ensure employees have the tools to succeed.
Operations
On call 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, this dedicated team maintains all aspects of AbeBooks' infrastructure from state-of-the-art servers to the phones on the desks. Their wide-ranging responsibilities include our primary and secondary datacenters, the production websites, our huge database, our internal network and systems, and software configuration management.
Our Locations
AbeBooks' HQ is located in Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. Located on the top floor of a glass-fronted building over-looking the Gorge waterfront, the office is an ideal setting for work. We are well known within Victoria and our employees take an active role in the local community. AbeBooks also has a thriving office in Dusseldorf, Germany, where the European side of the business is managed.
AbeBooks Subsidiaries:
Our Benefits
AbeBooks offers an extensive and generous benefits plan ranging from health and dental coverage to pension contribution matching. Our benefits program has helped the company win several HR-related awards in recent times such as a place on the list of Canada's Top 100 Employers for five successive years.
Our Culture
AbeBooks trusts its employees. We trust you to get the job done to the highest standard. We trust your judgment because we only hire the best. We want people who are not satisfied with the status quo but always ask how AbeBooks can be improved. We want people who are prepared to challenge others and themselves. And we do all this while having fun and enjoying life, and helping people buy and sell books.
Take the AbeBooks Office Tour:
Systems Engineer - AbeBooks.com
Are you an experienced Systems Engineer who gets excited about diving deep and looking at the broader context when solving technical issues? Do you enjoy analyzing and tuning hardware/software configurations, automating manual processes, designing scalable systems and identifying improvements? If you can answer "Yes!" to these questions and you have the skills to succeed in a fast paced e-commerce environment, we'd like to meet you.
AbeBooks.com - part of the Amazon.com group of companies - is looking for a Systems Engineer to work at our headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. You will work within our small, multi-talented Site Operations team to apply your skills and knowledge in scripting and systems administration to deploy, operate, and scale our global online marketplace.
Responsibilities:
- Perform operational and administrative activities for system management including diagnosing and correcting complex problems
- Develop scripting and programming for systems administration using one or more of the following: perl, python, ruby, shell
- Focus on metrics acquisition and analysis, including log processing and regular expressions programming
- Implement automated solutions for our infrastructure, working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other Amazon tool sets
- Effectively monitor performance of systems and work with teams to proactively identify pragmatic solutions
- Analyze and tune hardware/software configurations, automate manual processes, design scalable systems and make recommendations for improvement
- Multitask between site maintenance and project based initiatives.
- On-call pager responsibility for monitoring website, batch processes & infrastructure issues on a rotating basis (on-call rate adjustment provided)
- Work well in a cross-functional team with other members of the Engineering department
- Occasional travel for on-site administration at our remote Data Centre
Basic Qualifications:
- 1-3 years of hands-on experience in a Systems Engineer role in a 24/7 online environment
- Knowledge & experience working with Apache, Red Hat, VMware, Tomcat & Unix monitoring tools
- Great communication and interpersonal skills that enable you to work well with technical and business teams
- Hands-on experience with shell scripting and programming
Preferred Qualifications:
- University/college degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
- Experience with performance analysis, systems software, systems architecture & design, automation and security best practices
- Experience working in large-scale distributed environments
- Experience with Chef, Puppet or Fabric for deployment automation
- Understanding of messaging protocols and experience with administration of messaging queue products
- Understanding of TCP/IP networking, architecture and core technologies (DNS, LDAP, NFS, FTP, etc.)
- Experience using Amazon Web Services especially EC2, CloudFormation, VPC, CloudWatch, Route 53 & IAM
AbeBooks provides competitive salaries and great benefits. If you enjoy constantly broadening your technical skills, building software that affects users around the world, and working in an environment that thrives on creativity and product innovation, please complete the attached application form.
We appreciate your interest in AbeBooks
Junior Software Engineer
Do you want to use your software skills where they will have a real impact on the business's bottom line and the performance of a global online marketplace?
AbeBooks.com - a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. - is looking for a junior engineer with a strong sense of ownership and customer focus. If you are excited about the prospect of leveraging technology to address the technical and analytical challenges of running a large scale global marketplace, with thousands of international sellers listing more than 140 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books, we'd like to meet you.
This position is based at our headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. We also have a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany and from these two locations we run six international web sites: AbeBooks.com, AbeBooks.co.uk, AbeBooks.de, AbeBooks.fr, AbeBooks.it, and IberLibro.com.
As a member of our development team you will build and extend a wide range of systems, from buyer and seller registration, through search and inventory management, to order and payment processing. The diversity of these systems ensures that this position offers a broad and exciting range of technical challenges and opportunities.
The successful candidate will have the following qualifications:
- Experience developing with Java 5/6
- Solid understanding of OOD/OOP
- BS/MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent
- Solid background in algorithms and data structures
- Excellent communication skills
- Able to learn quickly and dive deeply to diagnose the root cause of problems
Understanding of the following would also be beneficial:
- Ecommerce
- Information retrieval and search
- Relational databases and SQL
- Maven, Spring, Hibernate, JDBCTemplate, Camel, JMS, JMX, HTML, AJAX, JavaScript, Tomcat
- Service-oriented architectures
- Agile practices and methodologies such as Test Driven Development and Scrum
At AbeBooks, we are passionate about serving our customers, solving hard problems, and creating great products. In order to get a better idea of what makes you awesome, we encourage you to provide short answers to the following optional questions as part of your application:
- Tell us about the system you are most proud to have worked on (inside or outside of work) and your role in its development.
- What from your previous experience do you think will allow you to thrive in this role?
- What has been the best thing you have done for your customers?
AbeBooks provides competitive salaries and great benefits. If you enjoy constantly broadening your technical skills, building software that affects users around the world, and working in an environment that thrives on creativity and product innovation, please complete the attached application form.
We appreciate your interest in AbeBooks
Experienced Software Engineer
Do you want to use your software skills where they will have a real impact on the business's bottom line and the performance of a global online marketplace?
AbeBooks.com — part of the Amazon.com Inc. group of companies — is looking for an experienced engineer with a strong sense of ownership, customer focus, and a passion for designing clean solutions to complex problems. If you are excited about the prospect of leveraging technology to address the technical and analytical challenges of running a large scale global marketplace, with thousands of international sellers listing more than 140 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books, we'd like to meet you.
This position is based at our headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. We also have a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany and from these two locations we run six international web sites: AbeBooks.com, AbeBooks.co.uk, AbeBooks.de, AbeBooks.fr, AbeBooks.it, and IberLibro.com.
As a member of our development team you will build and extend a wide range of systems, from buyer and seller registration, through search and inventory management, to order and payment processing. The diversity of these systems ensures that this position offers a broad and exciting range of technical challenges and opportunities.
Qualifications
- 3+ years experience developing with Java 5/6, with a solid understanding of OOD/OOP
- 3+ years developing high performance, high availability and scalable applications using technologies such as JMS, Spring, caching tiers, relational databases etc.
- BS/MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent
- Solid experience of testing and a passion for producing high quality code
- Solid background in algorithms and data structures
- Solid understanding of relational databases and SQL
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively in a cross-functional team to create exceptional value
- Familiar with Linux (Or Unix) environment
- Able to learn quickly and dive deeply to diagnose the root cause of problems
- Able to develop code independently or as part of a pair programming team
Experience with the following would also be beneficial:
- Ecommerce
- Information retrieval and search
- Relational databases and SQL
- Maven, Spring, Hibernate, JDBCTemplate, Camel, JMS, JMX, HTML, AJAX, JavaScript, Tomcat
- Service-oriented architectures
- Agile practices and methodologies such as Test Driven Development and Scrum
At AbeBooks, we are passionate about serving our customers, solving hard problems, and creating great products. In order to get a better idea of what makes you awesome, we encourage you to provide short answers to the following optional questions as part of your application:
- Tell us about the system you are most proud to have worked on (inside or outside of work) and your role in its development.
- What from your previous experience do you think will allow you to thrive in this role?
- What has been the best thing you have done for your customers?
AbeBooks provides competitive salaries and great benefits. If you enjoy constantly broadening your technical skills, building software that affects users around the world, and working in an environment that thrives on creativity and product innovation, please complete the attached application form.
We appreciate your interest in AbeBooks
International Opportunities at AbeBooks
About Our Technology
To booklovers around the world, AbeBooks is a great place to buy books. However, we have always been a technology company that helps booksellers and book-buyers. Since 1996, our technology has been helping to revolutionize the book business and that quest goes on.
Our technology workers are versatile, quick-thinking and thrive on deadlines. They plan and build systems that will yield long-term tangible benefits but also drop everything when required to solve critical issues where every minute counts. Anyone looking for a technology job at AbeBooks has to prove they are a flexible team player because there is no room for prima donnas. We do a lot with a relatively small number of people.
We are devoted to Agile practices and methodologies in software engineering, and e-commerce is a business that never sleeps when it comes to site operations. Our QA engineers are analytical on a global scale. Scalability is the magic word for the database administrators while the product managers have vision and a get-it-done attitude. Our web developers insist on the highest standards when building dynamic pages and user interfaces. Do you have what it takes to join our team?
Our Values in Technology
Customer Obsession
Will your work be good enough for our booksellers and our book-buyers?
Innovation
Knowing the latest technologies is essential but our long-term goal is always tangible products.
Bias for Action
We like no-nonsense trouble-shooters who can dive deep and fix problems fast.
Ownership
We have small teams and you will be your own CEO.
High Hiring Bar
Know your stuff. You will be tested every day in your career at AbeBooks.
Frugality
When every penny counts, the time and resources of our technology teams are not wasted.
Our Technology Teams
Quality Assurance
Using Agile practices, our QA engineers work closely with software developers and site operations to build innovative products that deliver a top-class customer experience. They also liaise with stakeholders from the business side of the company to understand objectives, evaluate deliverables against requirements and develop test suites that replicate complex real-world situations at scale. Must-haves include experience in security, performance, functional and reliability testing, also familiarity with Linux (or Unix), relational databases and SQL goes a long way. Our QA experts walk in someone else's shoes every day.
Software Engineering
The word 'versatile' barely scratches the surface when describing this team. Using Agile, Scrum and Extreme Programming methodologies, they build and upgrade a huge range of systems for buyers and sellers including search, inventory management, and order and payment processing. Essential experience includes Java 5/6, OOD/OOP, and the ability to develop scalable applications using technologies like JMS, Spring, caching tiers, and relational databases. Being able to write and test high quality code is a given but these engineers also know algorithms, data structures and Linux. The ability to trouble-shoot while under pressure is a valued skill.
Site Operations
Fast-paced and dynamic, our site operations team provides UNIX systems administration and support, switching between site maintenance and project-based initiatives, and working with state-of-the-art hardware and software too. Sections of this team are always on-call — 3am pager messages are not unusual. The work includes handling Apache web server configuration, Tomcat application servers, Cisco network hardware and administering Unix Systems and tools. Familiarity with a wide range of Internet protocols, and Shell and Perl scripting are also on the list of required abilities. This team encapsulates the 24/7 nature of ecommerce.
Database Administration & Development
Sound database administration skills are just the beginning. This group provides database support and development via backend programming. Members of this team are experts in SQL and Oracle and thoroughly understand client/server technologies and methodologies, as well as Java API calling patterns. They design and implement complex custom software systems using Oracle, PL/SQL, SQL and other third party libraries. Agile methodologies are also part of this team's working practices. Scalability is always a consideration when maintaining a database that grows every day.
Product Management
There's much more to this team than simply delivering new products on time. Our product managers understand the needs of book-buyers and booksellers, and they came to us with strong records in ecommerce or scalable software development. They understand product life cycles as well as Agile project management and software development methodologies like Scrum, XP and Crystal. Metrics and testing are second nature. Excellence in planning and execution is requisite. The ability to juggle tasks and improvise is highly valued as is the ability to understand and communicate with every department within the company.
Web Development
Working alongside interaction designers and Java developers, our web dev team gives a professional, enterprise-level look and feel to dynamic pages and Velocity-based servlets thanks to quality, robust code. They know X/HTML inside and out, and work with CSS, JavaScript, and DOM to produce innovative DHTML effects and a smooth user experience. The ability to smoothly integrate APIs into various interfaces is vital. Every day best practices in web dev are implemented in design, testing, version control, documentation, build, deployment, and operations. Keeping up with the latest standards in web development is essential.
