CAREERS

Gifts.com is looking for a Marketing Strategy Analyst. Gifts.com is the premier gift recommendation site, offering consumers great gift ideas and interactive, personalized shopping services that enable them to become better, more organized gift-givers. Gifts.com combines editorial sourcing with its proprietary gift recommendation algorithm and personality-based gift finder to deliver the most relevant and unbiased gift options available, ranging from popular and trendy to unique and unexpected.

This position acts as the strategic analyst to several areas of the business, including: our Marketing, Merchandising, Website Optimization and Finance teams. Our Marketing Strategy Analysts play a key role in identifying and developing business strategies; launching and testing initiatives; and analyzing and reporting on results. Responsibilities often include site testing, data modeling, quantitative analysis, research and forecasting.

We are looking for a self-motivated, quantitative, customer focused individual. The individual must love analyzing data and utilizing data mining and modeling skills to create actionable marketing and customer insights. Our ideal candidate will have a keen ability to synthesize, communicate and implement these recommendations to directly improve revenue and profitability for the company.

This position reports into the Chief Marketing Officer and is located in West Hollywood, California.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze marketing channel performance and return on marketing investment. Drive for improvement in results
• Brainstorm, prioritize, implement and report on marketing and website tests to drive improved financial performance
• Analyze customer behavior and data to generate insights and business opportunities
• Analyze merchandise assortment for growth/reduction opportunities, fit for customer base, and incremental enhancements
• Analyze merchandising algorithms and test improvements to the algorithm
• Test and implement pricing strategies
• Perform analysis on site conversion to identify potential areas of improvement within channels or within the order process
• Understand business drivers and report on key performance indicators
• Support marketing and finance teams in forecasting performance for the business
• Respond to ad-hoc analytics requests from various groups around the organization, including Marketing, Merchandising and Website Optimization
• Conduct other research and analysis as assigned

Qualifications:

• 4-year college degree from accredited institution/equivalent experience
• MBA or consulting background preferred but not required
• Strong business acumen
• Affinity for quantitative analysis and numbers
• Strong querying skills using SQL, and/or SAS
• High level of proficiency in MS Excel required
• Demonstrated ability to consistently identify and use all available quantitative information to make good business decisions
• Ability to work in a highly collaborative environment, multi-task and participate in team-based planning process.
• Knowledge of basic financial concepts such as revenue recognition and cost allocation.
• A minimum of two to three years job-related experience.
• Detailed-oriented, highly organized, and analytical with the ability to solve problems with confidence.
• Experience in database marketing a plus
• Excellent oral and written communication skills

Gifts.com, the number one online gift shopping resource expressly designed to better serve consumers who are looking for the perfect gift, is in search of a Systems Engineer. The engineer will have a prominent role within the Gifts.com organization, helping optimize and support the Gifts.com technical infrastructure while working on a variety of exciting initiatives. The candidate must be a self-starter who is comfortable working with a small team in a fast-paced start-up environment.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Maintain and support the existing Gifts.com infrastructure including databases, servers (both virtual and physical), SAN, load balancers, firewalls.
• Handle operational requests, including off hour support.
• Assist in planning and migration of systems to the cloud as needed.

REQUIRED SKILLS

• 5+ years of Linux in a production environment
• 3+ years of MySQL Administration in a production environment
• 3+ years of virtualization experience in a production environment (Xen or VMware preferred)
• Experience with Shell scripting
• Experience with storage appliances and provisioning
• Basic understanding of network topologies and related device such as routers, switches, and firewalls

DESIRED SKILLS

• Computer Science degree (MS or BS)
• Web servers such as Apache or Nginx (currently running Apache)
• Monitoring tools such as Nagios and Ganglia
• Amazon Web Services including EC2, S3, AutoScaling
• Experience with cloud based technologies and paradigms

* Applicants must have legal right to work in the United States.

The Senior Java Developer will be a key member of the technology team and will focus on enhancing key functionality on the Gifts.com website, backend tools and data processing jobs, public-facing APIs, and mobile initiatives. The developer will often work independently or on small teams in building complex functionality. This is a diverse and challenging role and will have prominence within the Gifts.com organization. As such, the candidate must be a self-starter who is highly motivated and comfortable working with a small team in a fast-paced startup environment.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develop and enhance intelligent search algorithms for delivering gift recommendations to users of the site or its suite of APIs.
• Design and architect scalable solutions for our public-facing web site, back-end tools and APIs following agile development methodologies.
• Be a key player in building Gifts.com's social marketing, mobile platform, and content distribution initiatives.
• Work independently or on small teams to complete development tasks.
• Participate in project planning sessions with product management and technical team members.
• Participate in design specification reviews and work with technical team members to determine technical design approaches.
• Estimate timelines for development tasks.
• Develop expertise in the Gifts.com application and technical infrastructure and ultimately become a subject matter expert over various portions of the web site.
• Mentor junior team members in Java and object oriented programming best practices.

REQUIRED SKILLS

• 6+ years of Java / J2EE web application development, on a high traffic, Internet site
• 6+ years of application development experience
• Strong understanding of Java 6, Servlets 2.4, JSP 2.0, JDBC, and SQL
• Understanding and experience with common design patterns.
• Familiarity with Spring Framework
• Understanding of a J2EE compliant application server
• Ability to design and implement scalable and maintainable software.
• Familiarity with object/data caching frameworks
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Working knowledge of Linux

DESIRED SKILLS

• Spring JDBCTemplate or Hibernate
• Understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and DHTML
• XML and Web Services/REST
• Experience with MySQL
• Experience with NoSQL data stores (Cassandra, Hbase, mongoDB)
• Experience with Hadoop
• Experience with multi-tier architectures
• Experience with thread programming

* Applicants must have legal right to work in the United States.

Gifts.com is seeking a Director, User Experience & Design to mentor and lead our existing in-house design team in driving UX and visual design excellence to our products. In this role, you will be expected to develop, define, refine and maintain product vision from concept to launch while working in close collaboration with Product Management, Marketing, Business, Engineering and Product teams. You will be considered our core subject matter expert on usability and visual design. You will also be responsible for guiding the creation of compelling user experiences and intuitive products across multiple platforms (Desktop, Mobile Web and Apple/Android Applications).

A strong technical understanding of cross-platform development (iOS/Objective C, Android/Java and Web/ HTML5) and expert understanding of user centered design is critical to this role. Art direction and visual design are secondary skills, but necessary to be considered.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage an in-house design team, their priorities and deliverables, and provide additional support/vision to the Product team with pre-production materials for new, innovative digital products (e.g. information architecture, personas, user experience and user interface, rapid prototyping a plus.).
• Play a key role in new initiatives by participating in meetings to help define product requirements that best achieve business goals. Provide leadership in user-centered design; contribute ideas, knowledge and insights on emerging trends across multiple technology platforms.
• Translate high-level concepts and requirements into intuitive, highly functional, and visually stunning digital products across existing and emerging technology platforms (Desktop, Mobile Web and Apple/Android Applications). Evangelize and improve on stakeholder ideas/concepts by proposing direction through PowerPoints, info-graphics, comps, storyboards, wireframes, and functional prototypes

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Degree in Illustration, Graphic Design, Art or Computer Graphics required.
• Minimum of 8 years leading product design initiatives in a production environment
• Experience with performing usability research and studies a plus
• Experience defining and communicating creative conceptualization and direction required.
• Experience working across multiple platforms required.
• Supervisory experience required.
• Expert Mac/PC computing skills.
• Expert knowledge of tools used by UX designers and researchers (Axure, Balsamiq, Visio.).
• Expert in mainstream graphics software Adobe Creative Suite.
• Must have excellent communication and presentation skills able to clearly communicate and sell creative concepts to clients and stakeholders.
• Must have strong knowledge of UX best practices and trends.
• Must have proven hands-on skill-set able to jump in and aid design team when necessary.
• Strong creative writing skills for quickly developing creative briefs and/or product vision statements.
• Portfolio representing breadth of work across digital platforms.

Gifts.com is looking for a talented Front-End Engineer, who will work in an extremely fast paced and agile environment, and play a pivotal role in developing the front end portion of our applications. This position will work with a cross-functional team in developing high performance, standards-compliant web interfaces that align with our business needs. The ideal candidate should be able to partner with internal business groups, including engineering, to align business requirements with site-stability objectives. He/she should be knowledgeable of current development methodologies and industry standards for all aspects of front end development.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Deliver best-in-class HTML5/CSS3/JQuery front-end code across a broad array of interactive web and mobile projects.
• Possess an advanced knowledge of web and mobile UX/UI; adhere to and extrapolate complex design systems and apply to coded pages, screens, and states.
• Develop and test across multiple browsers, platforms, and devices, including smartphones and tablets.
• Work independently and collaboratively with other developers in defining implementation strategies
• Participate in discussions with various team members about technical best practices and help teams identify optimal technical solutions.

Technical Requirements:

• Experience with jQuery and/or other JavaScript libraries.
• Knowledge of JSP/Java
• Experience with Git and/or other version control system
• Ability to write standards-compliant code
• Analytics solutions, such as Omniture and Google Analytics are a plus
• Ability to develop Search Engine Optimized code
• Ability to integrate HTML/CSS into dynamic Java environment

Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in a related discipline (preferred but not required). Minimum 2+ years in a front-end development position.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• High attention to detail
• Able to interact and understand business owners project requirements and timelines.
• Ability to manage time across multiple projects and tasks in a deadline-driven, team environment.

*NOTE: Candidates must include current development/code samples in order to be considered for this opportunity, and please be specific about your specific contributions and front-end languages used.

Gifts.com is seeking a proven, innovative Executive Editor, who enjoys creating a brand voice and Point-of-View, with a focus on delivering high-quality lifestyle content and sophisticated integration of images and words. The selected candidate will be responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of all Gifts.com content across all platforms. The ideal candidate will generate and promote novel ideas/processes, implementing ways to increase readership, using new technology and media. The Executive Editor will eventually oversee a team of Editors, to ensure all content issues are released on time and within budget. In concert with his/her team, and the Marketing and Merchandising teams, the Executive Editor will become the voice of Gifts.com, who’s expert opinions, memorable voice, and advice will make it the go-to source for the inspired gift giver’s lifestyle.

Job Duties & Responsibilities:

• Accountable for all Gifts.com publishing strategy, road-mapping and planning, including Editorial calendars and marketing activities across a variety of digital mediums (website, mobile apps, email, etc.)
• Works cross-functionally with Marketing, Merchandising, Public Relations, Creative and Product teams to drive effective, compelling content that inspires consumer action
• Constantly spotting, seeking and reporting on products, trends, occasions, celebrations and pop culture
• Writing effective, entertaining, high-quality gift guides, blog posts, etiquette guides and lifestyle stories to connect with the target audience
• Generates dynamic, engaging content within the Social Media space, that will cultivate the Gifts.com fan-base and community
• Generates ideas for features based on in-depth research and merchandising team input
• Work in concert with Merchandising team to create and approve a strong and compelling product mix
• Work with the Public Relations Team to create exciting story and pitch angles
• As needed, Executive Editor will act as a Gifts.com representative when social functions are publicized
• Participating in and creating compelling Editor videos
• Attend media events and trade shows for key Gifts.com lifestyle segments to explore and act on story-worthy and merchandising-worthy findings
• Conducting interviews when appropriate
• Responsible for eventual hiring, mentoring and managing of Editorial team

Preferred Qualifications:

• Minimum Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism, English, Marketing, Public Relations, or other Communications degree (Master’s Degree preferred)
• Min 8 years’ experience producing lifestyle content (published samples required)
• Min 3 years’ experience in an Editorial Leadership role
• Well versed in using social media platforms and tools (Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, blogging tools)
• Avid reader of lifestyle/pop culture magazines & blogs with “finger on the pulse”
• Knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite, Snag It and video editing tools a strong plus
• Professional presentation and communication skills, and comfortable being on camera
• Excellent time management and organizational skills
• Avid online shopper and passionate gifter a plus

***Note: Candidates must include samples of Lifestyle-related content/publications in order to be considered for this opportunity.