Platform and Operations Team Lead
THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED
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:
- make continuous improvement to system reliability, maintainability, and
observability
- configure and deploy both commodity and in-house software
- manage network and hardware configuration and system update and upgrades
- respond to interrupted service
As the team lead, you’ll also direct the four-person team, meaning:
- develop new team goals and standards of operation
- delegate work to team members and help them get it done and done right
- provide feedback on and management of your team members’ performance
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.
- 100% covered medical and dental benefits for you from day one
- generous contributions for partners and dependent coverage (also available from day one)
- four weeks of paid time off
- paid sick leave, holidays, and parental leave
- paid sabbatical for long-term staff
- annual professional development budget to fund your own growth
- supportive work environment
- team events to share your passions (from tech tools and user testing to crafts, movies, and games)
- fully remote until January 2021 (at least)
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