Platform and Operations Team Lead

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

We’re hiring a team lead for our platform and ops team. We provide email services that are fast, rock solid, and built on the ever-evolving Internet standards.

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

When the vast majority of people get email for free, the reason people choose a paid service is because they love email and value their privacy. We love our customers, and we want to give them the best possible experience. That’s where you come in!

About the job

The platform team builds and maintains the infrastructure that runs our services. This means caring for our hardware and networks, configuring and deploying both commodity and in-house software, thinking about capacity, and diagnosing unexpected problems. The team ensures site reliability, maintainability, and observability. We’re looking for someone who can contribute meaningfully to all of these tasks while also leading and organizing the work of a few other people.

We value generalists, and you’ll be asked to do work across many parts of the stack. You’ll work with our experts to get a handle on everything, so in a pinch, you’ll always have a grounding in what’s going on. We value teamwork, and you’ll be working to support the development, product, and comms teams — who are also there to support you.

As for specific technology, we believe that an experienced system administrator can get up to speed with just about everything we’re using, so ticking every box on our list isn’t as important as being able to learn as you go. For the record, though, our systems run Debian and a little SmartOS. We’re using Chef, Consul, Cyrus, Postfix, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, and plenty of software starting with other letters of the alphabet, too. You’ll definitely end up needing to write shell and Perl.

About you

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. 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.

You like having a team who can help you get the job done. You want to spend the time required to get them up to speed and keep them on track. You know how to keep a lone wolf from becoming a lost sheep. You want to create an environment of trust and reliability in the face of all the terrible things that computers will try to do to us.

You are eager to engage with your coworkers. You want to benefit from their experience so that your work meets everyone’s needs. You want to deliver your real solutions to their real problems. You know that the team includes everybody: you’re not just handling requests from development, but from customer support, marketing, and finance. You’re comfortable reading and producing clear, detailed written communication: emails, documentation, and specifications. With teams spread across multiple time zones with limited overlap, asynchronous communication is vital!

Working at Fastmail

If you come and work with us, you’ll be working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

We have an office in Melbourne, Australia, and we’re in close communication with them. Because of the time difference, this means a lot of email, a fair bit of Slack chat, and occasional video chats. This means that occasionally you will sometimes need to be available in the evenings for team meetings. Having staff in two very different time zones means there's often someone working when you're not, but there is an oncall rotation, and you'll have a slot on it.

We encourage employees to write and speak about the great work we do, and we value people who are enthusiastic to learn and improve their skills — and we give them a conference budget to do so. Many staffers write articles on our blog, and we hope you will, too. Several staff members are regular conference speakers.

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

This is a full-time role. Like everyone on our team, you’ll get great benefits. Our employees receive 4 weeks annual leave in addition to sick leave, holidays, and paid parental leave — and we’ll actively encourage you to take it. We offer paid sabbatical for long-term staff. We’ll set you up with equipment, books, and whatever else you need to do your job comfortably.

We are hiring for this role in the time of social distancing, so you will likely work from home to begin with. But in normal circumstances, you’ll be required to spend most of your work-time physically present in our offices. We value face-to-face communications (when it’s safe for us to do so!) There’s flexibility in that though - we are partners, parents and carers ourselves, and we understand time-zone flexibility goes in both directions. Talk to us if you’re unsure.

We welcome all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, age, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, disability, or sexual orientation.

About the only thing we can’t help with is visas 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