Principal Software Engineer Developer Tooling

About Gruntwork

Gruntwork aims to improve humanity's most important invention: Software. Our focus today is on creating a DevOps UX that software engineers actually enjoy, which we do by creating building blocks that make launching in the cloud 10x better/faster/easier. We work with AWS, K8s, Terraform, Terragrunt, Terratest, Go, Typescript, and React, and introduce new tech as needed. We’re a small team (~20 people), but our clients include Toyota, Adobe, TicketMaster, Verizon, and hundreds of startups.

We are profitable, self-funded (no investors, no debt), and pay salaries, equity, and bonuses according to transparent formulas. We are 100% remote, with 2/3 of our team in the USA and 1/3 in Europe. We plan company-wide in-person meetups every few months and are known world-wide for both DevOps thought leadership and our popular open source tools, Terragrunt and Terratest.

Our measure of a successful Grunt is (1) think like an owner, (2) make impact, (3) communicate effectively, (4) be a good person. If this sounds like you, we're hiring!

About The Role

Our infrastructure as code library and platform team delivers an end-to-end, best-practices infrastructure on AWS in just days, all as a product. In this role, you’ll collaborate with other senior-level engineers to define the next generation of AWS and DevOps best practices, codify them for use by thousands of engineers, and design a next-level experience for implementing, operating and understanding them.

What You'll Work On

• Build a better DevOps experience. We have a unique product that generates complete, multi-account AWS architectures for Terraform and Terragrunt in just a few hours using a collection of internal Golang tools. Help us take this to the next level by using that product to deliver prod architectures directly to customers, and then leveraging their feedback for improvements. Better yet, help us get to the point where the entire experience is completely automated or self-service.
• Codify AWS and Terraform best practices. Customers look to Gruntwork to share the best way to launch on AWS. Discover AWS and Terraform best practices, and then codify them as repeatable patterns that Gruntwork customers can pull off the shelf.
• Integrate with the Gruntwork platform. Integrate your product work with our company-wide platform, which consists of a REST API (Next.js/Typescript), a web-based single-page app (Next.js/React/Typescript, Tailwind), and a first-class CLI tool (Go).
• Build out the 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.) on AWS.
• Contribute to open source. Contribute to our open source projects as needed, including Terragrunt, Terratest, cloud-nuke, bash-commons, and more.
• Train and mentor. Play to your strengths and areas of expertise by not only writing code and working on the product but also by sharing knowledge and mentoring both other team members and our customers in those areas.
• Support customers. Gruntwork is a small, distributed, self-funded, profitable startup, so we'll ask you to provide a limited amount of support to enable learning directly from customers about how we can improve and continue achieving our vision of making it easier to understand, build, and deploy software.

Your Ideal Background

You should meet some of these requirements, but you don't need to meet all of them. As a company, we look for people who can leverage their existing skills to make significant impact in the near term. As an individual, you are likely looking for a growth opportunity, a core part of which is building new skills.

• You know how to write code across the stack and have experience in one or more of the following: Go, C++, Python, Typescript, Bash, React, Next.js
• You have production-level experience with AWS.
• You have expertise in one or more of the following: Kubernetes (any managed offering, preferably EKS), ECS<, EC2, Lambda / Serverless, API Gateway, RDS, S3, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty, IAM, VPC, VPN.
• You have worked with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools like CloudFormation, CDK, or Pulumi in prod.
• You have experience achieving compliance and going through audits (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, vendor, etc).
• You have a strong background in software engineering.
• You have strong communication skills in English and are comfortable engaging with external customers.

Your Ideal Values

• You have a passion for imparting best practices to other developers.
• But you would rather invest the time to automate a problem than do the same work again.
• You have a passion for learning (new technologies and languages specifically).
• But you are motivated most by making impact.
• You are inspired by our values (https://gruntwork.io/about/#our-values).

Compatible Time Zones

You'll be working with a team in the US time zones, so you can be located in almost any country as long as your time zone is no further west than Los Angeles (GMT-8/GMT-7) and no further east than New York (GMT-5/GMT-4). We've found that when everyone on the team is located in similar time zones, it's easier to collaborate and there's much less pressure to stay up late or get up early, so this is a hard constraint, even if you're willing to work hours different from your current time zone.

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.

• Location Independent, Above-Market Salary. To reduce bias and increase transparency, we compute all salaries using formulas. The formula factors in your title and uses a multiplier to produce a result that's above market for that title. Our salaries are location independent.
• 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.
• 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 $1,000 USD 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).
• Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance. We offer a range of high-quality plans with a large portion paid by the company. For countries other than the US, this includes extra coverage on top of your statutory insurance.

In addition to the global benefits listed above, we have some US-specific benefits as well:

• 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 401(k).
• Disability insurance. If you get disabled, we have a policy that will pay out a portion of your salary.

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.