Travel Website Startup Hopper Raises $8M, Moving to Boston, and Hiring!
Boston -- Hopper, a startup travel website founded by a team of former Expedia employees, announced on Monday it has raised $8 million in new funding from Atlas Venture and Brightspark Ventures. The company, which was started up in Montreal, said it plans to relocate to Boston. Hopper is developing a website for consumer travel with a search engine that allows users to discover destinations and products using only keywords. The company said it is applying cluster computing techniques to build “the world's largest database of travel information.” Hopper was founded in 2007 and previously raised $2 million in 2008, bringing the company's total funding to $10 million.
We're always looking for smart and creative people to help us bring to life new ideas about how online travel should work. We use information extraction, machine learning, distributed computing and custom search algorithms to transform ridiculously huge volumes of data into useful information. Think you can help?
Software Developer
Hopper is seeking a part-time or full-time Java Developer to design and implement great code, notably in the areas of search engine and information extraction technology.
We make extensive use of machine learning techniques to crunch vast quantities of data with the goal of extracting meaningful information. To support the heavy processing load, we work with new technologies such as Hadoop, Map/Reduce, Weka, Cassandra, and Lucene. Our front-end is built on Ruby on Rails.
This position will involve, among others, the following challenges:
- Designing and improving information extraction technology
- Designing and improving search engine technology
- Refactoring, rewriting and optimizing prototype code into robust and scalable production code
- Developing efficiently distributed Map/Reduce tasks that can process millions of records in seconds on a Hadoop cluster
Systems Administrator
Hopper is seeking a part-time or full-time Systems Engineer to oversee network and application configuration, integration, deployment and monitoring of its lab and production environments operating on custom hardware and cloud (Amazon EC2) clusters.
The candidate will be responsible for:
- Development and improvement of systems and data integration processes
- Design and coding of automation scripts in Java, Ruby and Bash
- Acquisition, construction and maintenance of cluster hardware
- Configuration and deployment of cloud instances and software applications in production
- Execution and monitoring of Map/Reduce processing jobs
- Monitoring and auditing of all production systems and software.
- Managing backups of critical production data
- Overseeing production site security and performance tuning
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