Quora (Palo Alto) would hire someone if we found the right person.
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers. We're a startup based in Palo Alto, CA founded by Adam D'Angelo, who was previously CTO and VP of engineering at Facebook, and Charlie Cheever, who led Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.
http://www.quora.com/about/index
http://www.quora.com/about/jobs
http://www.quora.com/about/challenges
Some of the challenges are highly algorithmic, such as coming up with ways to organize and categorize the information effectively so that users can efficiently find what they need; others are very technical, such as working to make a web application that is complex while still being very fast; and many of the challenges are in product design, such as figuring out a way to set up and grow a healthy community and constructing intuitive interfaces for users.
We are committed to building a cutting-edge technology company that develops software the right way and is a place where engineers love to work. Some of the tools we are using include Python, Pylons, nginx, memcached, Thrift, and git. We're using continuous deployment and EC2, so all code you write will go live to production within minutes no matter what time it is. Both founders are developers. We want to build a fantastically strong engineering team and the first engineers that join us should set the tone for that.