So you want to work at Twitter, huh? The idea of working at a startup sounds pretty glamorous. 

The Twitter offices, located in San Francisco's historic Market Square were designed by IA Interior Architects and have a rooftop garden with Twitter branded corn hole games, a cafeteria named after their chef @birdfeeder, and many open working spaces to use at your leisure. And like all cool startups (duh) they have yoga rooms, fitness rooms and game rooms.

Who wouldn't want to work at a startup, right? All foozeball, all the time, right? Just kidding, that's one of those over-generalizations people who work a strict 40 hours a week make about startups because they don't work 12-18 hour days on the regular. I'm a total supporter of work-life balance especially in the high-stress world of startups.

But with that in mind, if you're looking for Twitter jobs, know that the startup world is a bit different than what you might be used to. If you think you'll be able to clock out at 5pm every day, you might be better suited for a different job. If you want to adopt your colleagues as a second family because you're up with them launching products until 2am on a fairly frequent basis, the startup life might be for you.

If you're ready to start applying, check out the Twitter Jobs board and follow @JointheFlock on Twitter.

While the early days of Twitter called for jobs mostly in engineering, they now have a huge team in lots of different departments: engineering, design & research, trust & safety, business development, international affairs, infrastructure ops, product development, support, human resources and education.

 

Another good thing to know is where there are offices local to you. Twitter has offices in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, DC, London, Dublin and Singapore.

Most jobs directly with Twitter are in San Francisco, but you'll find jobs for Twitter's owned properties like Crashlytics in Boston. In Singapore, the jobs are mostly for recruiting, while DC seems to be for legal stuff. 

What Does Twitter Pay?

Twitter pays their employees above average for the startup world. According to Glassdoor.com, these are average salaries at Twitter:

• Senior software engineer: $149,127
• Product manager: $142,448
• Software engineer: $121,487 
• Front-end software engineer: $97,956
• Recruiter: $82,240
• Account executive: $60,221

The highest paying job was a staff engineer at $178,888. The lowest was an account executive at $59,849 and recruiters at a $81,153. Almost ninety thousand dollars to get other people jobs? Sign me up!

Even interns make a good living. A software engineering intern makes an average of $7,025 per month, or around $84,000 per year.

The employee benefits, like any well-funded startup, are crazy good. They pay for your health benefits, offer flexible vacation, catered breakfasts and lunches, 401k, paid maternity and paternity leave, reimbursement for a gym membership (even though they have fitness rooms), in-office yoga and pilates, commuter compensation, laundry service and corporate discounts on things like Zipcar and wireless carriers.

What is Twitter Looking for in an Employee?

If you're a team player, you'll thrive at Twitter. According to their hiring page, "each employee has a voice and a chance to innovate. We have raucous weekly all-hands meetings where tough questions are asked and answered because we maintain a culture of openness and trust from the inside out."

If you're applying for a Twitter job on a bit of a higher tier, you'll need a different skillset. Only two of their executive officers and directors, have technical experience. According to Forbes, the majority "have undergraduate degrees in a myriad of subjects, from French literature to East Asian Studies to Philosophy, while co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, who serve on Twitter’s board, are college dropouts."

Vivek Wadhwa reinforces this, saying, "You don’t need technical skills for board meetings. You’re not sitting there writing code. You need business skills, management skills and you need to understand corporate ethics and standards."

According to Mashable, Twitter Director of Communications Matt Graves explains, "There's no one set of skills or experience we're looking for — it really depends on the position. But we do look for certain traits: hard workers, smart thinkers and respectful team players. Having a great sense of humor is a (big) plus; I've never worked with so many funny people in my life." He also recommends including your @username on your resume.

On Quora, a Twitter employee named Anamitra Banerji offered some realistic expectations: "Be super prepared for your interview. If you are interviewing for an engineering position expect to code a lot - as prep, research Twitter's architecture, infrastructure, and language preferences. If you are interviewing for a business oriented role, read up on all the recent coverage in the press and educate yourself in our ad products, partnerships, strategic landscape etc." Also, try to network with people in the company if you can and impress every person that interviews you so that it's a unanimous "yes" when the hammer comes down.