About a year ago I woke up to a loud chirp. It wasn’t a bird (though we did have two birds fly down our chimney in two days around the same time). It was the smoke alarm. This wasn’t the “OH MY GOD THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE” alarm. It was the “let’s wake you up in the middle of the night so that you can change the battery” alarm. I ignored it… until it went off again five minutes later… and again… and again. So I’m in my underwear standing on a chair trying to disable this thing. It’s 3 AM and the smoke alarm is just out of my reach. I am at the point where I’ll do anything to go back to sleep, and there’s a baseball bat in the nearby closet…. and then I’m finally able to disable the alarm. I understand that smoke alarms with dead batteries can’t save lives, but there has to be a better way (especially considering that climbing on a chair when you’re sleep-deprived is pretty dangerous). Nest agrees. They’re a Palo Alto, CA based company that “takes the unloved products in your home and makes simple, beautiful, thoughtful things.” Their first product was a thermostat, and now they’ve just announced a smoke and carbon monoxide alarm.

Find a Nesting Place

It says a lot about a company when they’re able to generate excitement about devices like thermostats and smoke alarms. A lot of people liken Nest’s design sense to Apple’s. They should–Nest’s Founder and CEO “created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone.” These certainly aren’t need to have products, but life is a lot easier when you have a thermostat that programs itself to save energy and a smoke alarm that can be silenced with a wave (and messages your phone when it needs new batteries). Most of the criticism that Nest receives is about price, but that’s ok. Their products aren’t for everybody… yet. If you like where Nest is headed, take a look at their Careers page. There are some really interesting opportunities including:

• Algorithms Software Engineer
• Control and Artificial Intelligence Engineer
• Data Scientist
• Embedded Security Engineer
• Integration Engineer
• User Experience Designer

Nest is very specific about experience requirements on some postings, and not so specific on others, so it’s hard to say which of these jobs might be best suitable for a new or recent grad. If you’re not a great fit for any of these positions, you may want to take a look at the Nestling Internship Program.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• Nest.com
• Jobs at Nest
• About Nest
• Nest’s Blog
• Nest in the News

Would you buy a Nest?

We've identified Nest as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• all employers
• analyst
• California
• consumer products
• data
• design
• engineering
• product development
• software development
• user experience
• web development

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