San Francisco’s Sift Science opens new Seattle engineering center, led by Amazon vet

Monica Nicklesburg | GeekWire | 13 February 2017

“Sift Science, a heavily-funded San Francisco-based company that builds software to fight fraud online, is opening up a Seattle outpost, led by a former Amazon senior manager — becoming the latest Bay Area startup to open an engineering center in the city.

Some big-name customers like Airbnb, Zillow, and OpenTable, use Sift to identify bad actors by flagging risky or abusive behaviors before they commit fraud. The software helps e-commerce companies and other online brands reduce chargebacks, fraudulent transactions, and account abuse.

Sift Science employs 80 at its headquarters in San Francisco. The Seattle office, opening up in Westlake Tower downtown, will tap the region’s developer talent pool to build new products and tools.”

Read more here.

View Sift Science job openings.

 

Hoteliers Comb the Ranks of Tech Workers to Gain an Edge

Julie Weed | The New York Times | 13 February 2017

“The front desk manager or housekeeper may epitomize the hotel employee, but the hospitality industry is increasingly dependent on tech workers, vacuuming data scientists, web designers and other experts into its ranks.

More than ever, guests look to their phones and computers to research, book, stay in and communicate with hotels. That translates to critical technology needs in information security, mobile development and systems integration.

Inside hotel operations, data analysis can help find new customers, make a dining room more profitable or provide information to executives making business decisions.”

Read more here.

 

If They’re Nasty To Job Applicants, How Nice Can They Be To Employees?

Liz Ryan | Forbes | 12 February 2017

“We humans have wonderful, big brains, but our brains can also confuse and mislead us.

When we’re job-hunting, we can easily start to believe that if we only stick with an employer through the ups and downs, delays and irritations of its recruiting process, maybe in the end we’ll get an awesome job!

In my experience, that is almost never the case.

The companies that treat you badly as a job-seeker don’t treat their employees any better. In fact, these companies do you a great favor by showing you right away how little they value talent, or people.”

Read more here.

 

Startup that pays people to legally hack Starbucks, Nintendo raises $40M

Luke Stangle | Puget Sound Business Journal | 8 February 2017

“HackerOne, a startup that helps companies create “white hat” hacking incentive programs, said today that it’s raised $40 million in new funding.

HackerOne’s roughly 700 customers include Starbucks, Airbnb, CloudFlare, General Motors, GitHub, New Relic, Nintendo, Qualcomm and Uber. It ran a high-profile, one-month bounty program last year with the U.S. Department of Defense, where 1,400 hackers found 138 bugs. It later ran a similar program with the U.S. Army.”

Read more here.

View HackerOne job openings.