We’ve been growing like a weed at SimpleGeo. When Matt and I started SimpleGeo I couldn’t have dreamed we’d be able to build the team we’ve managed to build. I’m excited to announce we’ve got five (FIVE!) great new team members starting at SimpleGeo in the coming weeks.

One area where Matt and I quickly identified a need for more brain power was on the geography/cartography side of things. We’re happy to announce that we’ve hired Schuyler Erle and Seth Fitzsimmons to form the foundation of our geography/cartography team. Schuyler Erle is well-known in GIS circles and has worked at Metacarta, maintains geocoder.us, helped create OpenLayers, and is active in the OpenStreetMaps community. You might know Seth Fitzsimmons as one of the main engineers behind Yahoo!’s FireEagle service. More recently Seth has been working on location features for Flickr.

Another area where we’re in need of some help is in wrangling our ever-growing cluster and burgeoning datasets. I’m happy to announce we’ve more than answered this need by hiring Ben Standefer and Kim Vogt. I’d previously worked with Ben at Digg where he’d both interned as a Systems Engineer and worked as an Analyst in Digg’s Research and Development department. He joins us from Eventbrite where he lead their systems and infrastructure efforts. Kim Vogt, on the other hand, is currently wrangling Hadoop clusters and dabbling in machine learning at the prestigious Lawrence Livermore Labs. We’re extremely excited to have Ben and Kim lead our infrastructure efforts moving forward.

Last, but not least, we’ve hired a representative for all of the developers who are, and will, be using our platform. Andrew Mager joins us from Ning where he’s been doing frontend development. That being said, Andrew’s true passion is helping engineers and evangelizing technology he finds interesting. He’ll be supporting developers, writing blog posts, and reaching out to the community. Expect to see him at your nearest location meetup. 

And so there were thirteen. Hard to imagine SimpleGeo is less than a year old and, we think, has already managed to put together one of the best engineering teams around. If this sounds exciting to you, let us know.