Platform and Operations Team Lead

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Come run the platform and ops team that powers Fastmail — email services that are fast, rock solid, and built on Internet standards your colleagues are putting into the world!

What you’ll be doing

Together with the rest of our team, you’ll work on our email services Fastmail, Pobox, and Topicbox.

Fastmail doesn’t just provide great email services. We are the driving force behind the Cyrus open source mail server platform, as well as JMAP, a standard for email, contacts, calendars, and more. We’re looking for a team lead to keep service reliable and responsive.

We expect you’ll spend your time split between individual contribution and team management in a roughly 2:1 ratio.

You’ll spend the majority of your time hands-on maintaining, improving, and building out the infrastructure that runs our services. Your job will be to:

As the team lead, you’ll also direct the four-person team, meaning:

You’ll be setting direction in collaboration with our CTO, to whom you will report directly.

We value generalists, and you’ll work across many parts of the stack, with easy access to and frequent collaboration with experts in other parts of the system.

We also value teamwork, so you’ll work closely with the development, product, and comms teams — who are also there to support you.

Who will do well at this job

You’ve already spent years managing networks of unix machines before, handling deployment of custom and off the shelf services, and creating an operational environment that you — and others — could maintain and build on.

We believe that an experienced system administrator can get up to speed with just about everything and learn as they go. For the record, though, our systems are mostly Debian. You’ll definitely end up working in shell and Perl. (If you’re curious: we use Apache, Consul, Cyrus, MySQL, nginx, Postfix, Prometheus, and of course many other things.)

You know you can do more with a team, and you love working with people who can help you get the job done. You’re happy to spend the time required to get them up to speed and keep them on track, because you’ll both see the benefits of doing so.

You are happiest when nothing is going wrong. When something goes wrong, that’s okay. You roll up your sleeves, deal with the problem, and think about how to prevent it from happening again. When nothing is going wrong, you spend your time making sure things stay that way or, just as often, making the things that are going right go even righter. You like this because it makes life better for your coworkers, not just because of its technical perfection.

Working at Fastmail

This is a full-time role. Like everyone on our team, you’ll get great benefits.

This job is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Right now, we’re all working from home, but in general we have a strong in-person culture, and would like to have someone who will be on site and part of that culture once it’s safe to hang out in person again.

We also have an office in Melbourne, Australia, and we’re in close communication with them. This means that you’ll need to be available for an hour or two of evening calls each week. We are partners, parents and caregivers ourselves, and we understand time-zone flexibility goes in both directions. Talk to us if you’re unsure. (Also, once it’s safe to travel again, you’ll have the opportunity to travel to Melbourne, an artsy and charming Australian city!)

You can read about our values, and our blog contains interviews with some of the people who will become your colleagues at Fastmail.

We encourage employees to write and speak about the great work we do, and to stay engaged with their professional peers. Many staff members choose to attend conferences for learning and networking, and several staff members are regular conference speakers.

We welcome all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, age, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, disability, or sexual orientation. We can help you relocate to Philadelphia if needed. The thing we can’t help with is a visa or sponsorship. You must already have the right to work in the United States.

Sounds great, what’s next?

Email us at platform-lead@jobs.fastmailteam.com to introduce yourself and tell us why you would be a good fit for the job. Send us a resume (as a PDF, please). More importantly, though, have something else to say! Let us know what you’re interested in, what makes the job interesting, and anything else you want to tell us up front.

Job Type: Full-time