I met with William Uranga, Staffing Director at TiVo yesterday. William is one of the more tech savvy recruiters I have met. He teaches a class at UC Santa Cruz Extension in online recruiting. TiVo likes to build a pipeline of candidates so that even though you may not have 100% of a particular job’s credential, you’re qualified to be part of their talent network.

You would think that more than 1,000 people work at TiVo with large army of followers and brand, but they are a company of 500 employees (plus contractors and temps) in Alviso, CA.

At TiVo they look for engineers with skill sets and talent. They want those who not only have developed solutions, but who have also had to maintain those solutions (read: no “drive-by developers”). There are many who stay at a company, develop a solution and leave within 18 months so they have not had to live with and maintain a product. TiVo wants engineers who have stayed the following credentials (per their site).

• Object-oriented analysis and design skills (4+ years)
• C++ language skills, including Templates (4+ years)
• Significant development experience in a Unix/Linux environment (2+ years)
• Scripting language experience (e.g., PHP, Perl, Python) (1+ years)
• Understanding real-time software characteristics including inter-process communication, message passing, locks, priorities and threads
• Able to work across many features in a large code base
• Development in a team environment
• Good debugging skills
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Development of test and troubleshooting tools and related documentation

The following skills and experience would be a plus, but are not strictly required:

• Developing/designing highly scalable server systems
• Working with relational databases
• Broadband content delivery or video server technology
• XML and web services design and development
• Working with Apache and other related open-source tools
• Complex data structure modeling, optimization and algorithm expertise
• BS or equivalent experience required. Graduate degree a plus.

TiVo is unique and successful because of diversity of thought, skill sets, experience and pure talent. Click here to see jobs at Tivo

Roger