Grockit is building sophisticated tools that encourage good learning through good teaching. As programmers, we take full advantage of this approach.

Paired Programming: Pairing allows us to spread expertise while also writing elegant code. It also helps us to be super agile. By trading pairs often, everyone has an opportunity to have a comprehensive understanding of the entire code base, and we all collectively own the code (and the rare bug).

Test Driven: Code at Grockit starts by writing a test that asserts what we expect our code to do. We then make the test pass by writing the simplest amount of code possible required to satisfy the test. Repeating this process for every feature means that we have significant test coverage (for every one line of application code we average 4-5 lines of test code).

Integration: And, we don’t settle on simple tests – on every commit to our code base we automatically run the entire test suite. If we’re going to fail, we want as many chances to know about it as quickly as possible.

We couldn’t have developed this approach without Pivotal Labs, our agility mentors. Pivotal Labs has been sharpening their agile development process for over a decade by teaching companies like Grockit how to adopt their style of agile.

Finally, we’re hiring. Come join us as we write the best code we’ve ever written.

Open Positions

We’re always looking for excellent code, web, and game designers. If you’re passionate about designing beautiful code, luscious graphics and compelling games we’d love to host you in our office for a few days as part of our somewhat non-conventional interview process.

Some of the traits we look for

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Passionate about excelling at your thing, be it code, cognitive science, or graphic design.
• Eagerness to fail in the pursuit of learning.
• Compassion, respect, and empathy for those you’re creating for.
• The right proportions of humility and confidence.

We respect that potential candidates might not know if they possess these traits. When in doubt, send us your resume and we’ll have a conversation about your experiences. Be concise, accurate (no buzzword fluff please) and show us something interesting.

Life at Grockit

We love what we do and we want to love where we do it. So, we work hard to foster not only a productive work environment but also a comfortable, fun and healthy one too.

Productive: Besides hiring great folks and employing agile development practices, a few of the ways our physical environment helps us to GTD include an entirely Apple office with 30 inch monitors, top of the line Mac Pros and ergonomic keyboards. We also use a powerful software development tracking tool to manage our work throughout the entire organization from engineering to operations to academics.

Comfortable: We start with “cheap desks, expensive chairs” and wrap it all in a space with plants, couches, a kitchen filled with snacks and drinks, breakfast, lunch, and even a loft if you need to crash.

Fun: Lunch time Wii challenges in Mario Kart, the occasional evening Werewolf session and spontaneous weekend parties are pretty standard fare in our San Francisco Office.

Healthy: Sure our daily breakfasts and lunches are tasty, but they are also nutrient dense and all most entirely organic. Our water is filtered through a 10-stage filter, and we even offer cold pressed coffee. For cleaning, we only use non-toxic supplies. Our health benefits are comprehensive (health, dental, vision) and then some, as every month we put cash into a HSA for each of our employees. You never lose your HSA money, it sits in a bank account you can access, and you can use the HSA Bank Card to pay for preventative medical care or to cover the cost of deductibles.

Green: In addition to being non-toxic, we strive to use only environmentally friendly cleaning supplies. We are also proud of the fact that we recycle and compost far more than we trash, use high efficiency lighting, and purchase our food from local businesses and farms.

We are also constantly learning and improving the ways we can make our work environment better.