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. We hire Grunts in many countries, so some details may vary.

  • 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.
  • Pension/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 16" Apple MacBook Pro (or other computer of your choosing of equivalent value) upon joining. It will be owned by you, not the company.
  • Personal Budget. We'll give you a personal budget of several hundred 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).

100% Remote

Gruntwork is a remote-first company. That means you can work from home, a co-working space, cafe, or wherever else you prefer, there's no commute, and you have complete control over your work hours. To allow at least a few hours of overlap between all employees for the occasional live meeting or pair-coding session, we are currently hiring from most countries in the time zones between GMT-7 (e.g. California, USA) to GMT+2 (e.g., Berlin, Germany).

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.

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 Engineering

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:
Apply Now

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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:
Apply Now

Sales

Sales Engineer

Senior Sales Engineer

Senior Salesperson

Director of Sales

We're looking for a Director of Sales who can own the sales function at Gruntwork. To date, we've asked a small number of DevOps engineers to handle sales calls in addition to their core work. As our company and lead volume have grown, our team wants to stay focused on core product development projects, leaving sales without the attention it deserves. Now we're looking to make our first dedicated sales hire and eventually build up a multi-member sales team at Gruntwork.

As the Director of Sales, we'll look to you to create a sales strategy, handle all incoming leads from initial inquiry to signed contract, refine our pitch, measure our success, and lay the groundwork for building up a future sales team. You'll be supported by our current world-class engineers as they transition from "engineer sales person" to "sales engineer." You'll work closely with and report directly to the founders.

What You'll Work On

  • Lead sales strategy at Gruntwork. Gruntwork has become a multi-million dollar company with no outside investment, no debt, and a few humble engineers leading the way on sales. How do we transition from an engineer-led sales process to a more effective one led by sales? How do we measure our success? You'll lead the charge to answer those questions and implement the strategy.
  • Design the sales pitch. Our sales presentation today involves Gruntwork engineers speaking to customer engineers with no slide deck needed. Customer love the detail and first-hand technical knowledge, but our engineers need the ability to focus on building our product. You'll help us craft an updated sales pitch for a target market (software engineers and DevOps engineers) that is averse to the classic Powerpoint and hungry for the technical details.
  • Streamline our sales workflow. We are a company of engineers so a part of us dies when we see manual data entry taking up time unnecessarily. We'll look to you to design a streamlined sales workflow that captures key data and enables key metrics using either our existing CRM (Salesforce), or to make the case for a new CRM.
  • Manage deals. We receive a growing number of leads each month and are struggling to keep up. As our first dedicated sales hire, you'll roll up your sleeves and respond to leads, lead sales calls, and close the deals. You'll engage with some of the largest enterprise companies in the world — and throughout the world — as well as cutting-edge new startups.
  • Light marketing. You'll primarily focus on converting qualified leads into signed contracts, but there may be low-hanging fruit opportunities to bring in more leads. We'll look to you to identify and coordinate those opportunities, backed by additional budget if needed.
  • Grow a sales team. You'll lay the groundwork for building up a multi-person sales team. Once we can make the case that hiring another person in sales will be a positive return on investment, we'll look to you to recruit, train, and manage the growing team.

Your Ideal Background

  • Ability to sell. We can trust you to own all new opportunities ranging from small to company-changing. You should have confidence in your ability to effectively convert qualified leads to a signed contract. You should have prior experience closing deals end-to-end with both small startups and large enterprises.
  • Ability to lead and strategize. Your past results either prove you can successfully own strategy and leadership for our sales team, or this opportunity represents a natural next step in your career.
  • Moral grounding. A core principle at Gruntwork is doing the right thing. We expect all Grunts to be honest and never compromise their integrity. We understand there's a natural pressure to close the deal, but we only sell products to customers when we genuinely believe they will be of value. You should feel comfortable saying no when necessary so that we can all sleep better at night.
  • Technical skill. You should be able to build a reasonable mental model of what Gruntwork does and field a common set of customer technical questions. We'll look for indicators that you've done that before, or better yet that you have a technical background in software engineering or DevOps.
  • Bonus: Consulting skill. Gruntwork helps customers deploy production-grade cloud infrastructure in record time, and sometimes general questions come up that call upon us to become temporary consultants. Or when speaking with large enterprises, you can speak thoughtfully at the level of broad industry trends.

What time zones do we work in?

While Gruntwork generally hires anywhere between San Francisco and Berlin, candidates for this role must be within the GMT-7 to GMT-3 time zones, with a preference for being located in the USA or Canada. We expect you'll work primarily with customers and fellow Grunts in those time zones, with limited engagement with customers worldwide and Grunts in Europe. Working during reasonable hours is a priority for us.

If the above describes you:
Apply Now