As an entrepreneurial backend / systems engineer, you’re caught between two worlds. You’ve toyed with the idea of just taking a job at Google, Facebook, or one of the other established big companies. You know they have more than enough interesting problems to keep you engaged, but you have a nagging feeling that you’ll be just another cog in a multi-thousand engineer machine. You want to work at a startup, but the thought of building yet another social-this or game-mechanics-that doesn’t really appeal to you.
At PagerDuty, we’re building an alerting and incident tracking system to help IT operations groups detect and respond to issues. Startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between rely on us to alert them quickly when they have operational troubles. We’ve got interesting technical problems in spades, but with a staff of only 13 people, we’re still very much a startup. We’re looking for an engineer to help us add the features our customers are clamoring for, while helping us maintain our unsurpassed uptime record as we continue to acquire new customers and scale out our systems.
You’ve worked on distributed and highly available systems. You’ve had experience with different system architectures, and have opinions about what works and what doesn’t. Concepts like consistency, availability, real-time dispatching, and distributed queueing aren’t merely buzzwords for you. You’ve spent enough time working on systems to know you can’t have it all.
You’ve worked on enough mission critical software to know that reliability comes from a fault-tolerant design checked by an extensive test plan. When stuff goes wrong, you know that getting the system back up is only the first step. Fixing the gaps in the design and test plan is where the real work gets done.
You know your way around a RDBMS — you can design schemas, write queries, and debug index problems. Although the term “NoSQL” still causes you a nervous tick, you admit that there are some interesting ideas coming out of that world.
You have a broad background in Computer Science fundamentals. You know that while there might be more than one right way to do something, there’s usually an awful lot of wrong ways. You’ve been doing this long enough to know that some theoretical knowledge of how the whole stack fits together can save days of hair-pulling when debugging a performance problem.
We don’t hire based on experience with a handful of tools. Instead, we want smart, capable, and experienced people who can learn our tools (and suggest new ones!) as needed.
We build PagerDuty, an IT operations tool that reduces downtime by helping businesses reliably and rapidly respond to high-severity incidents in real time. We’re a San Francisco based, 13-person startup backed by Y Combinator and some of the Valley’s most prominent investors. PagerDuty is trusted by hundreds of startups, several Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between. For more information, please see our site.
To apply, please drop us a line at jobs@pagerduty.com. If possible, please include a couple of sentences about a project you’ve worked on that you’re particularly proud of.
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