Gruntwork Careers

Seeking qualified grunts.

Focused on improving humanity's most important invention: Software.

Our mission is to make it 10x easier to understand, build, and deploy software (see our mission and vision page for more details). If you're passionate about making software 10x better and believe you can make a significant impact, we'd love to hear from you.

Gruntwork is a Human-Friendly Company.

We aim to build a company:

  • Where you get to take on big challenges, but the hours are reasonable.
  • Where everyone is treated fairly and with respect, but where disagreement is welcome.
  • Where the team takes great pride in our craft, but also gets things done.
  • Where we are all focused on advancing the company's mission, but get plenty of time off.
  • That is welcoming, safe, and inclusive for people of all cultures, genders, and races.

In short, we want to work on interesting problems, with interesting people, while leading interesting lives.

How We Work

Check out How we built a distributed, self-funded, family-friendly, profitable startup and How we got to $1 million in annual recurring revenue with $0 in fundraising for all the details on what we do, how we fund it, how we hire, and how we work.

Benefits

Our benefits reflect our values. We believe compensation should be fair, transparent, and generous.

  • Above-Market Salary. We compute your salary formulaically, using as inputs the average salary for your job title in New York City, the Gruntwork multiplier (currently 1.45) and the cost of living in your home city relative to New York City as reported by numbeo.com. We aim to systematically pay above market.
  • Profit-Sharing Bonus. We set aside a pot of money at the end of each year based on profits and distribute bonuses according to a formula that uses as inputs your level within the company and the length of your tenure at the company.
  • Performance Bonus. We give performance-based bonuses of $5,000 - $15,000 as often as once a quarter, depending on your performance.
  • Progressive Equity. We grant progressive equity to all new Grunts.
  • Medical Insurance. We offer high-quality plans, including some with no deductible through JustWorks.com. We cover 80% of your health insurance costs and 55% of those of your family.
  • Dental Insurance. We offer high-quality plans and pay for 100% of the cost.
  • Vision Insurance. We offer high-quality plans and pay for 100% of the cost.
  • FSA and HSAs. We don't contribute to these accounts, but we do offer them as an option.
  • 401(k). We contribute 3% of your salary to your 401(k), regardless of how much you contribute yourself.
  • Disability insurance. If you get disabled, we have a policy that will pay out a portion of your salary.
  • Hardware budget. We'll buy you a brand new 16" Apple MacBook Pro upon joining. It will be owned by you, not the company.
  • Personal Budget. We'll give you a personal budget of $500/month to spend on improving your health, productivity, or knowledge.
  • Minimum Vacation. We require that you take at least 4 weeks of vacation per year.

The above benefits reflect our offering package for Grunts based in the USA. For Grunts based in other countries, we make every effort to offer an equivalent total package specific to that country.

100% Remote

Gruntwork is a remote-first company.

Sane Working Hours

Although we're a distributed team, we only hire candidates between the time zones of GMT-7 (San Francisco) and GMT+2 (Berlin). This means you'll never be separated by more than 9 hours from your colleagues and never pressured to work at crazy hours just to get your work done.

We also plan project teams based on geography so that most of your collaboration will be with team members in a similar time zone.

Open Positions

We are always ready to add the next Grunt, but as a 100% bootstrapped company, we only hire when our revenue supports it, so timing matters. If you're inspired by what you've seen and believe in a little serendipity, we would love to hear from you. Here are the positions we're currently looking for:

Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

What You'll Work On

  • Infrastructure as Code Library: create reusable infrastructure modules for a variety of infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, ELK, Consul, Vault, Kafka, InfluxDB, etc), using a variety of tools (e.g., Terraform, Go, Python, Bash, Docker, Packer, etc), across many clouds (e.g., AWS, GCP, and Azure).
  • Gruntwork Platform: build a fundamentally better DevOps experience. Our SaaS Platform consists of a REST API (Node.js, TypeScript), a web-based single-page app (React, TypeScript, SASS), and a CLI tool (Go).
  • Open Source: contribute to our open source projects, including our open source modules, Terragrunt, Terratest, cloud-nuke, bash-commons, and more.
  • And a little bit of everything else. Gruntwork is a small, distributed, self-funded, profitable startup, so things are changing all the time, and we all wear many hats. You should expect to write plenty of code, but, depending on your interests, there will also be ample opportunity to write blog posts, give talks, contribute to open source, go to conferences, talk with customers, do sales calls, think through financial questions, interview candidates, mentor new hires, design products, come up with marketing ideas, discuss strategy, consider legal questions, and all the other tasks that are part of working at a small company.

Your Ideal Background

  • You know how to write code across the stack ("Dev").
  • You have experience running production software ("Ops").
  • You have a strong background in software engineering (or are working hard on it!).
  • Bonus points for a sense of humor, empathy, and curiosity.
  • Note that we're less concerned with prior experience than we are with curiosity about all areas of the stack and demonstrated ability to learn quickly and go deep when necessary.

If the above describes you, email us at careers@gruntwork.io.

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Be an SRE without being on call! Help Gruntwork develop its internal SRE practices as well as offer SRE as a product to enable our hundreds of customers to achieve world-class operations and reliability, all while not being woken up at 3am!

What You'll Work On

  • Build an SRE product offering: Create a new product offering for Gruntwork customers that includes Production Readiness Reviews, training and implementation strategies for SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, chaos engineering strategies, blame-free post-mortems, logging, monitoring, and alerting strategies around availability, latency, and overall systems health. This solution will be deployed both internally for Gruntwork and externally for our customers.
  • Spend Max 50% of Your Time On Toil: We are adamant about having our SREs spend 50% of their time or less on toil and the rest on engineering solutions to reduce it for the whole team. We enforce this by using a rotational schedule that ensures at least 50% of your time is free for engineering work.
  • No On-Call: A key goal at Gruntwork is that no one should have to be woken up in the middle of the night or on New Year's Day due to an outage. We do not have an on-call rotation now and we’re building out an SRE team to help us keep it that way. How do we design products where outages don’t require paging someone? How do we design infrastructure where these outages are rare? What sorts of SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs should we promise customers? and the rest engineering solutions to reduce it for the whole team.
  • Document tribal knowledge: Capture siloed knowledge and create knowledgebase articles, runbooks, and other documentation for the internal team as well as Gruntwork customers.
  • Gruntwork systems: Own the systems and infrastructure that power our web presence, internal tooling, and upcoming Software as a Service platform.
  • World-class customer support: While participating in business-hours only support rotations, triage customer requests, teach Gruntwork and DevOps best-practices, help resolve problems, escalate to internal SMEs, and automate and document the solutions so that problems are mitigated for future users.
  • And a little bit of everything else. Gruntwork is a small, distributed, self-funded, profitable startup, so things are changing all the time, and we all wear many hats. You should expect to write plenty of code, but, depending on your interests, there will also be ample opportunity to write blog posts, give talks, contribute to open source, go to conferences, talk with customers, do sales calls, think through financial questions, interview candidates, mentor new hires, design products, come up with marketing ideas, discuss strategy, consider legal questions, and all the other tasks that are part of working at a small company.

Your Ideal Background

  • You hate doing the same thing twice and would rather spend the time to automate a problem away than do the same work again.
  • You have strong communication skills and are comfortable engaging with external customers.
  • You know how to write code across the stack (“Dev”).
  • You have experience running production software ("Ops").
  • You have a strong background in software engineering (or are working hard on it!).
  • You have a passion for learning new technologies and languages
  • Bonus points for a sense of humor, empathy, and curiosity.
  • Note that we're less concerned with prior experience than we are with curiosity about all areas of the stack and demonstrated ability to learn quickly and go deep when necessary.

If the above describes you, email us at careers@gruntwork.io.

Senior Product Designer

Help us make Gruntwork delightful!

What's Gruntwork?

We give software teams a complete, world-class cloud infrastructure that lets them go to prod in days. Typically, the process of launching prod infrastructure in the cloud is awful. It takes months of tedious work, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and often results in poorly maintained code and anti-patterns in the end. We call our company "Gruntwork" because we take away this Gruntwork for our clients so that they can focus on the parts of their software that are unique to them.

We are 100% remote, ~15 people, profitable, growing (even during COVID!) and fully bootstrapped with no debt and no investors. Our small company works with both startups and name companies like Toyota, Adobe, and the US House of Representatives. We also care a lot about humans.

What's the opportunity?

  • Product Design. We're building a SaaS platform that will become the primary customer experience of our product. Today, customers access our product as private GitHub repos plus a patchwork of links to training and documentation. Working with you, we envision a portal where customers login to discover and use all the elements of our existing product, brand it to themselves, and ultimately offer a UI-based way to learn, deploy and manage infrastructure in the cloud, all backed by infrastructure as code under the hood.
  • Branding and Marketing Website. We have an improved understanding of our business that we'd like to reflect in a new public marketing website. We'll look to you lead the design effort here.
  • Design system. You'll be our first full-time designer so you will set the design direction for the entire company across all areas of design, working directly with the founders and closely with engineers.

Although you'll be the only professional designer on the team, our company cares deeply about design so you'll have many eager collaborators when it comes time to brainstorm.

What skills are we looking for?

  • Product sensibility. When we present our product vision, we'll look to you to offer opinions, insights, and methodologies to help us translate that vision into a fantastic product.
  • Design skill. At the end of the day, the designs you create should look great and be easy to use. Our hope is that you can make our users smile.
  • Domain expertise. We don't expect you to have a complete vision for our product on day 1, but we're looking for someone who either already understands our domain (DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, AWS), or who feels comfortable ramping up on it.
  • Bonus: HTML/CSS. If you can roll up your sleeves and review our engineers' work in HTML/CSS, you can help us make sure the final product is true to your vision.
  • Bonus: Engineering Background. If you happen to have an engineering background such as previous experience coding an app or a computer science degree, that may give you additional insight into how our product might especially delight users.

What time zones do we work in?

While Gruntwork generally hires anywhere between San Francisco and Berlin, for this role, you'll be working with a team based in the USA/Canada (GMT-7 to GMT-3). We prefer to hire candidates located in the USA or Canada, but are open to hiring in any country within those time zones. Unfortunately, this role is not available outside the GMT-7 to GMT-3 time zones.

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