Hi, my name is Brad Touesnard. I’m the founder and CEO of SpinupWP, a modern cloud server control panel designed to manage WordPress sites and serve them lightning fast.
We are a small team of talented developers, designers, and marketers. There’s our dev team of Ashley, George, James, and Daniel;our designer Lewis;and our marketers Caillie and Sam. I have a background as an engineer, but these days I’m the product manager, CEO, and whatever other hats need wearing. I’m very proud to say that our company has been managing to delight thousands of customers, working from our homes since 2017.
We have big plans for the next 12 months and this is a great opportunity to join a small team of talented folks building an awesome product.
The Job
Our talented team of developers have re-invented the term “Full Stack Developer,” developing everything from Vue.js on the frontend to Ansible/Bash scripts for the workers. They also manage our SaaS app infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and handle technical support escalations.
The scope of their job is too broad and needs to be narrowed. That’s where you come in.
I’m looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer who will collaborate with our dev team. They will use their experience and expertise to help the dev team design and implement the app’s workers, manage our infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, and take over as the primary contact for support escalations.
(If that last part scares you, know that we only provide typical SaaS support, during our work hours Monday to Friday. No one is on call. We don’t provide 24×7 incident response or anything like that.)
Responsibilities
- Help design and build new features using PHP (Laravel), Ansible and Bash
- Support our customers via email
- Monitor and maintain Linux servers
- Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines
- Write documentation
- Write articles and tutorials for our blog
Requirements
- 5+ years of DevOps experience supporting a complex SaaS web application
- Expert Linux sysadmin skills including maintenance, security, backups, monitoring, etc. (Ubuntu)
- Advanced Bash scripting skills
- Experience with infrastructure configuration management tools (Ansible)
- Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines
- Strong PHP development skills
- Knowledgeable in Web-Queue-Worker architecture
- Familiar with systems and networking (DNS, SSH, HTTP)
- Excellent English communication skills (spoken and written)
- Self-motivated and work well independently
- Love working remotely
Bonus Points
- Experience building a web app using Laravel
- Javascript development experience
- Experience with hosting WordPress
- Open source contributions
- Computer Science degree or equivalent
About You
You’re thrilled to work with the latest hotness tool, language or framework but also thrive working on a “fixer-upper” project. You respect old code, no matter how ugly it looks. You truly enjoy figuring out how old code works, refactoring it, and tackling the challenges that come with it. You have experience doing this type of work and know you love it.
You’re a problem solver who loves to analyze an issue, recreate it and track it back to the source of the problem. You won’t commit any code unless it’s fully tested and solves the problem. Better still, you write the tests to go with it.
You feel a profound sense of accomplishment after helping a customer resolve an issue that was frustrating them. You have a strong compulsion to help when people need it. It’s important to you that people get the best possible answer, not just a reply.
When you encounter something you’re not sure about, you stop, research, ask questions, and make sure, rather than giving it a best guess. The idea of sending incorrect information to a customer is mortifying and completely unacceptable to you.
You’re curious and love to learn. You embrace the opportunity to level up, learn something new and really dig into it. You’re a disciplined worker and have no trouble getting work done at home on any given day.
You value consistency above preference and will adopt new coding styles, standards, and tools to that end. You are stellar at identifying the simple, elegant solution in a sea of over-engineering possibilities.
Although you enjoy working with people to help you generate ideas and formulate a plan of attack on a project, you do your best work in isolation without interruption. You’re proactive in tackling things that need to be done without direction.
You’re exceptional at communicating in writing via direct message, email, etc. You’re ok on the phone and video chat too. You understand that clear, concise written communication is how remote teams thrive. People being confused by a message you’ve posted is extremely rare.
You own both successes and failures. When a project you’re leading turns into a disaster, you own it and you learn from it. You never point the finger at others.
You invite criticism and genuinely want to grow as a professional. You’re onboard with pushing each other to be better and are not afraid to give constructive criticism in addition to receiving it.
The Offer
- Remote First. We have always been a remote company, since the very start in 2012. Working from home has its challenges, but you’ll be surrounded by compassionate folks who have been successfully working from home for many years.
- Company Retreats. As a remote company, it’s super important to get some face time. We just had our first company retreat in a few years in San Diego, around WordCamp US 2022 and had a blast. Will you be joining us in 2023?
- Location Independent. Work from wherever you’re happiest. All members of our team currently work from their homes in Canada, the UK, the US, and Mexico.
- Choose Your Schedule. Most companies claim to have flexible hours, but the reality is often very different. We flex our hours for real 💪. As long as on average you’re working the number of hours you’ve committed to working each week, we’re good.
- Personal Development. If there’s a conference or event that will help you level up, the company will cover your expenses. You’re also allotted some time each month to learn something new unrelated to your job, participate in community discussions, and/or contribute to an open source project.
- Profit &Exit Sharing. I share a financial report with the team quarterly so everyone knows how the company is doing. And when the company does well, the team does well. When we sell the company, members of the team get a share of the proceeds based on their tenure.
- Company Holidays. Things get pretty quiet in late December / early January, so we always treat ourselves to a couple of weeks off to reboot during this time.
- Paid Leave. For the birth or adoption of a child, the company offers 8 weeks of 100% paid leave for primary caregivers and 3 weeks for secondary caregivers. We also offer 5 paid sick days and 3 days of paid bereavement leave.
- Health Insurance. Members of the team based in Canada are eligible for health/dental/life/disability insurance through the company’s Chambers of Commerce plan while those outside of Canada are eligible for a stipend to partially cover insurance costs.
- Competitive Salaries. The company typically pays salaries that are competitive with the market in which you reside. There are situations that call for higher pay even when living in a region with a lower cost of living, so we’re flexible on this.
Apply
I wrote this job posting like an informal message to you. Please reply to it in an email (no attachment letters please), introduce yourself, and let me know why you’re applying. Describe how you meet the Requirements, if you score any Bonus Points, if you’re the person I describe, and what’s on your resume that I ought not miss. Send your reply to work@spinupwp.com.
We are an equal opportunity employer. Application information that is prone to unconscious biases is hidden during the review process whenever possible. We judge the content of the applications on their own without knowledge of the applicant’s race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, or age. We support workplace diversity, but not at the expense of equal opportunity and meritocracy. We’re looking for talented and empathetic people no matter their other attributes.
I look forward to reviewing your application.
Brad Touesnard
Founder &CEO
SpinupWP
Founder &CEO
SpinupWP
Data source
We Work Remotely