Gruntwork Careers

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.), atop AWS.
  • 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

Software Engineering (Contract)

Senior Software Engineer (Contract)

Principal Software Engineer (Contract)

At Gruntwork, we have created a library of production-grade infrastructure code that is used by thousands of developers around the world. We are getting more support & maintenance requests for the library than our small team can currently handle, so we are hiring contractors to help us scale the team up and down in response to inquiry volume. Although you would start as a contractor, focused on support & maintenance, this is a job with a view to full-time employment!

This is a contractor position, paid based on an hourly rate. We expect an average of 10 hours of work per week though it'll fluctuate up and down, with more hours on some weeks (e.g., 30 hours) and fewer hours on other weeks (e.g., 0 hours).

What You'll Work On

  • Infrastructure as Code Library: create and maintain reusable infrastructure modules for a variety of infrastructure (e.g., EKS, ECS, RDS, VPC, Lambda, EC2, S3, ElastiCache, etc.), using a variety of tools (e.g., Terraform, Go, Python, Bash, Docker, Packer, etc.), atop AWS.
  • Document team knowledge: Capture siloed knowledge and create knowledgebase articles, runbooks, and other documentation for the internal team as well as Gruntwork customers.
  • Open Source: contribute to our open source projects, including Terragrunt, Terratest, cloud-nuke, bash-commons, and more.
  • 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.

Your Ideal Background

  • You have a strong background in software engineering, with 5+ years of experience.
  • You know how to write Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
  • You know have deep experience with AWS.
  • 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 in English and are comfortable engaging with external customers.
  • You have a passion for learning new technologies and languages.
  • Ability to write Golang and Bash is a nice to have!
  • You live within our time zone bounds (GMT-7 to GMT+2).
  • You're interested in working an average of 10 hours/week.
  • You can respond to support & maintenance requests within a 2 business day SLA.

If the above describes you:
Apply Now

Sales

Sales Engineer

We've grown to millions of dollars in annual revenue with zero outside investment/debt, near-zero marketing budget, and a small number of software engineers who handle all sales calls in addition to their core work. Now we're ready to take our sales to the next level!

Our product is used and purchased by software and DevOps engineers, so we are looking for a sales professional with proven experience selling products that enable software engineers. As the first sales hire, you'll report directly to the founders and have considerable impact on the overall growth of the company. Your growth path in this role could be as either a star individual contributor or team lead (at Gruntwork, we value IC and management roles equally).

What You'll Work On

  • Manage deals. Own the deal from inquiry through contract signature. Engage with both large enterprises and startups.
  • Showcase the product. Show customers how the Gruntwork product works. Answer both their high-level strategic questions and common technical questions. When necessary, collaborate with our engineering team to answer a detailed question or build your knowledge.
  • Make customer-driven tweaks where needed. Does the customer want to see an integration out of the box we don't yet support? You can add it directly, following the patterns we've laid down with other integrations.
  • Develop new markets. Our product works well for customers building greenfield in AWS or doing migrations. What kinds of customers might find themselves in that situation? Identify those opportunities, figure out what the customer wants, and write content/guides to help showcase our solution.

Your Ideal Background

  • Experience in tech. You understand the cloud, are familiar with core elements of at least one major cloud provider, and have experience selling to software engineers. Ideally, you have some kind of background in engineering or coding from earlier in your career.
  • Technical skill. You're tech-savvy, can build a full mental model of our product, and can learn to demo a core part of it on your own. At the same time, you know when to bring in the product engineers to assist.
  • Sales skill. You can effectively qualify leads, understand customer needs, demo our product, and close the deal with a range of customers from startups to large enterprises. You delight both in knowing the product and signing up customers who will genuinely benefit from it.
  • Moral grounding. You feel comfortable saying no when necessary so that we can all sleep better at night. In general, you do the right thing for customers, for Gruntwork, and for yourself.

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