Site Reliability Engineer - remote

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.

Benefits

• Above-Market Salary. To reduce bias and increase transparency, we compute all salaries using formulas. The formula factors in your title and location and uses a multiplier to produce a result that's above market for that title and location.
• 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 as often as once a quarter, depending on your performance.
• Progressive Equity. We grant progressive equity to all new Grunts. This means that, in the case of a large exit (e.g., acquisition), the financial benefits get distributed more evenly across the whole team rather than solely going to the founders.
• Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance. We offer a range of high-quality plans with a large portion paid by the company.
• FSA and HSAs. We don't contribute to these accounts, but we do offer them as an option.
• 401(k). We contribute a portion of your salary to your pension or 401(k).
• 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 benchmark Apple laptop upon joining. It will be owned by you, not the company.
• Personal Budget. We'll give you a personal budget of one thousand dollars per month to spend on your workspace (e.g., a co-working space), health (e.g., gym, yoga), time (e.g., babysitter), and/or learning (e.g., books, courses).
• Minimum Vacation. We require that you take at least 4 weeks of vacation per year. And we'll track it to make sure you do!

Life First, Then Work

We believe in planning our work around our lives, not the other way around. To help achieve that we offer:

• Remote work that lets you control your hours and physical location.
• Normal working hours that usually amount to not more than ~40h per week, and no working on weekends or holidays.
• Deliberate project planning that takes into account the time zone of all team members.
• A minimum vacation policy where you must take at least 4 weeks per year away from work.
• No one carrying a pager and no on-call rotation. We enable this by only offering support contracts with SLAs of responses on business days / hours only.

Skills &Requirements

• 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.