JavaScript Genius Needed!

We are seeking a technical peer who can bring genuine insight to product design discussions, and also deliver quality code in a timely fashion.

"MSN Today" is a portal web page that is launched when a user signs into the Windows Live Messenger IM client. It is little known by name, but it is one of MSN's most widely seen web pages with roughly 3 billion page views and 250 million unique users per month in 45 markets worldwide (and still growing). Here's a link to our production UK page (requires IE6 or above).

The team will consist of four developers including this CSG position. This is an excellent opportunity for a CSG to be able to say "I improved the lives of 250 million people today!" You will probably never find another product where you can exert this level of dev influence across such a massive, established, and global user base. You will also learn how to professionally ship massively-scaled web sites. The larger team owns the MSN Portal pages (e.g. www.msn.com) across all markets worldwide. You may also be assigned to ad hoc tasks for these other products and other one-off projects, but this is extremely rare.

Innovate! Make peoples' lives better in a material way by connecting them with the relevant content that they care about most, in a UI that is easy and intuitive. Concurrently, improve the lives of Microsoft's market subsidiaries, advertisers, and shareholders. Ship small incremental improvements in regular monthly cycles on a web publishing platform operated by an external team. Most of the work will be client-side DHTML/JavaScript coding specifically targeted for IE6/IE7/IE8, combined with publishing system coding (XSLT work to emit xhtml).

Overtime is not anticipated, but may be necessary in rare instances. A separate team owns live-site support-so almost everything we do can wait for normal business hours.

• JavaScript
  
• JavaScript
  
• C# or XSLT

• Need a supremely talented and experienced JavaScript developer. Everything else negotiable.
  
• C# and XSLT skills are bonus.
  
• Prior MSN dev experience puts a candidate to the front of the line. (Or prior experience on any other site with 100s of millions of users.)
  
  
• Must have extensive hands-on experience coding IE6/IE7 clients using DHTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
  
• Must be available for a full 12 months.
  
• Must be an intelligent and creative thinker who learns quickly.
  
• Must be able to produce quality code at a reasonable pace consistently over time.
  
• Must be a self-starter.
  
• Must be able to collaborate in a team and champion important issues tactfully.

• Should have at least one year experience shipping code on massively-scaled web sites. (Preferably MSN or Microsoft.)
  
• Should care strongly about the user's experience, and should be able to think through and design for all use cases even when they are not completely documented in a spec.
  
• Should be an experienced coder with good programming habits developed over time by shipping real products to real people.
  
• Should have some additional coding experience in additional languages, preferably XSLT and C#.
  
• Should have some experience coding for non-IE browsers.

• Manual AJAX (as opposed to drag-and-drop AJAX tools)
  
• Web page performance tuning
  
• Content publishing systems
  
• Silverlight
  
• Automated builds
  
• Shipping localized/globalized products
  
• Scrum development methodology
  
• General familiarity with datacenter ops terminology, hardware, and tools (e.g. edge-caching networks, load balancers, etc.)
  
• MSN / Windows Live organization.