From an Elevator Pitch to a Rails Infrastructure Role
Kyle Kingsbury’s path to Vodpod began not with a traditional interview circuit, but with a short public post. As a graduating physics major at Carleton College, he took part in the school’s new “Engagement Wanted” program. The format was simple: graduating seniors post a brief “elevator speech” describing what they’re looking for. Running less than 70 words, the pitch outlined his mix of interests and skills: a year-long role before physics grad school, six years in IT and ops, plus experience as a photographer, designer, *nix admin, and Ruby-capable web developer.
The responses came weeks later. One led to a calorimetry engineer position at Fermilab. The other came from Mark Hall, CEO of Vodpod, a video aggregation and publishing site. Hall initially offered job-hunting help for San Francisco, but conversation shifted as Kingsbury detailed his past projects — it became clear he might be a better fit for the Vodpod team itself. After technical interviews (the kind where you explain HTTP on the spot), the company asked for a working demonstration using their API.
While still working on his book, Kingsbury authored a lightweight set of Ruby bindings for Vodpod’s JSON interface and released it as an open-source gem. That was enough to land the offer. He eventually left Kryptiq, his employer of the previous six years, and flew out to San Francisco shortly after graduation.
Now he’s designing the infrastructure to push the company’s Rails application toward roughly one million requests per day, and building the new API on the Ramaze web framework — work he admits will make returning to grad school after a year off a tough call.
