Structured Data Wrangler (Perl on Linux Expert--backend)

Structured Data Wrangler

Our search engine can exploit structured data (i.e. lists, feeds) to do a better job in returning the best web content for a query. The more structured data we can pour in the top, the better we can refine the results flowing out of the bottom. Your job will be to lead the effort in making structured data available throughout the Company's system.

You will help define and build infrastructure for gathering data from many sources (web sites, RSS feeds, etc.) and then making this data programmatically accessible to various client components within the Company's back end.

Consider the following tasks:Write a program to extract the list of current Academy Award winners and update the existing list in a MySQL database instance. Given an RSS feed, write a program to check the feed daily and extract the title attributes from the stream and dump them into a text file.

If either of these seems scary, then this isn't the job for you. If you are already thinking about how these tasks could be a) better specified and b) easily automated, then this might be a fun job for you.

Required skills include:Perl, Linux, and the ability to write programs that extract data from web sites. You should have experience with text parsing. You don't need to be an expert in SQL, but should be comfortable with getting data into and out of MySQL databases. Familiarity with RSS/Atom is a plus, as is basic C/C++ programming skills. Clear verbal and written communication skills.