Help us improve humanity's most important invention: Software

Our mission is to make it 10x easier to understand, build, and deploy software. If you share this passion and believe you can help us make impact, we'd love to hear from you.

IDEALS

Gruntwork is a Human-Friendly Company

Building a great company is just as important to us as building great products. We aim to create a company where:

You get to take on big challenges, but the hours are reasonable.
Everyone is treated fairly and with respect, but where disagreement is welcome.
The team takes great pride in our craft, but also gets things done.
We’re all focused on advancing the company's mission, but get plenty of time off.
The environment feels welcoming, safe, and inclusive for people of all backgrounds and identities, without exception.
In short, we want to work on interesting problems, with interesting people, while leading interesting lives. We hope you do too.

Benefits

A rewarding place to work

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.

Competitive & Transparent Salary

We’re committed to paying above-market salaries. 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 in your area.

Generous Equity Grants

We all share a stake in the success of the business, and our equity grants reflect that. To reduce bias and increase transparency, we compute all stock grants using formulas which factor in your title and hire date. We also offer a Change in Control Bonus Plan, inspired by Progressive Equity, so in the event of a large exit, all employees will take home a larger portion of the proceeds (not just the founders).

Medical, Dental, & Vision

We offer a range of high-quality insurance plans, most of which are fully paid for by the company. For countries other than the US, this includes extra coverage on top of your statutory insurance.

Retirement Plan

We contribute a portion of your salary to your 401(k) or your pension (depending on your country of residence).

Profit-Sharing Bonuses

We set aside a pot of money at the end of each year based on company profits, and distribute bonuses according to a formula that takes into account your level within the company and the length of your tenure.

Wellness Budget

We 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 savings (e.g., babysitter), and/or learning (e.g., books, courses). How you spend it is up to you.

Hardware Budget

We buy you a brand new Apple MacBook Pro (or other computer of your choosing of equivalent value) upon joining. It will be owned by you, not the company. We’ll also replace it every 3 years.

remote work

100% Remote

Gruntwork is a remote-first company. That means you can work from home, a co-working space, cafe, or wherever else you prefer; there's no commute; and you have complete control over your working hours. To allow at least a few hours of overlap between all employees for the occasional live meeting or pair-coding session, we are currently only hiring from most countries in the North and South American time zones.

Where we work

We balance the benefits and drawbacks of the all-remote lifestyle by hiring within North and South American time zones, which guarantees at least a few hours of overlap between all employees for the occasional live meeting or pair-coding session.

We gather at GruntCons

We believe in the importance of face-to-face meet-ups to enable social connection, build team rapport, and facilitate high bandwidth activities. Several times each year we host “GruntCons” at locations around the world where the entire company comes together to socialize, solve hard problems, and push the company forward.

100% Bootstrapped

We own our company and our destiny

Unlike many venture-backed startups, Gruntwork is fully bootstrapped. We've grown the business responsibly and profitably based on the revenue we generate, without seeking external funding. This frees us up to think long-term, treat our people right, center on our customers, and avoid the pressures of unsustainable growth often imposed by investors. This model also makes our equity grants and profit sharing bonuses all that more valuable, as we truly believe in taking shared ownership of the company we’re building.

WORK/LIFE BALANCE

Life first, then work

We believe in planning our work around our lives, not the other way around. To help achieve that we offer:

All-remote lifestyle

Work from anywhere you’re more comfortable and productive. Whether that’s your home office, a local coffee shop, or a coworking space (we’ll cover the cost!), you can find the mode of working that works best for you.

Flexible working hours

We don’t expect Grunts to exceed ~40h per week, and we discourage working on weekends or holidays. You’ll also have the flexibility to configure your work schedule around your life, not the other way around.

Deliberate project planning

We take into account the time zone of all our team members when coordinating project planning, to ensure that you don’t have to work before or after hours to stay in sync. We also emphasize async work modes and communication methods when possible to avoid unnecessary time constraints and distractions.

Minimum vacation policy

We one-up “no vacation policy.” We know how important it is to relax and unwind, so we require that you take at least 4 weeks per year away from work. By the way, that’s in addition to our 2 week winter holiday break when we shut down operations each year.

Meeting free days

We know how important it is to have time to focus. We maintain a policy of scheduling meetings only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, leaving Tuesday and Thursday free and uninterrupted. You can still pair code, chat ad hoc with others, or meet as needed, of course — the point is to give you that time to do with as you please, so you have the space to be your most productive.

HOW WE HIRE

Get a sense of our hiring process

We’re trying to build a diverse team that is welcoming and safe for people of all backgrounds, cultures, genders, and ethnicities. We don’t use puzzles and brainteasers in our interviews, as they are a complete waste of time that do little more than make the interviewer feel smart. We don’t do whiteboard coding interviews, as they test the wrong skills and discriminate against many developers, and often become little more than a hazing ritual. And we don’t do salary negotiations, as they lead to gender discrimination. Here’s what you can expect:

Connect

Either you find us (e.g., through our careers page) or we find you (e.g., through your blog posts, talks, open source work, or a personal connection). We’ll take a look at your background and make sure you meet our basic criteria:

You know how to write code, or have worked with many who do.
You have experience creating and shipping production software.
You want to help create software to transform DevOps.

Meet the team

We’ll set up video calls with a few team members. These chats help us understand what you’re looking for, and help you understand what we’re looking for. Tiny, bootstrapped, distributed startups in the DevOps space are not for everyone, so we try hard to understand what you’ve worked on in the past, what you want to work on in the future, and to share as much as we can about the type of work we do so that we can come to the right mutual decision.

Work with us on a paid trial project

If the chats go well, we’ll invite you to a paid trial project. Instead of you spending a day doing whiteboard coding at a company’s office, we ask that you take a day to work on a real project for us, from the comfort of your own home (or coffee shop or library or wherever you prefer working). We might have you fix a bug in one of our open source projects, add a new feature to an existing module in our IaC Library, or even build an entirely new module that a customer requested. We’ll introduce the project to you at the start of the day, chat with you via Slack and email throughout the day, and then review your work at the end.

In other words, it’s basically a regular work day—which is exactly the point! Our goal is to give you an accurate feel for what it would be like to join Gruntwork. By the end of the day, you should have a good idea of the type of projects we work on and what it’s like to work with us, and we should have a good idea of what you’re capable of and what it’s like to work with you.

Receive an offer

If the trial project goes well and everyone wants to move forward, we’ll make an offer. As noted in the benefits section, Gruntwork pays a competitive above-market rate according to a formula to ensure transparency and fairness. We do not negotiate salaries.

In our own words

What we love about Gruntwork

“Working at Gruntwork has opened my eyes! After multiple venture-backed "successes" where I saw my teammates burnout, get divorces or worse I am so grateful to work for a company that takes a human-first approach to growth. Being bootstrapped gives Gruntwork the freedom to create a company that serves its employees and customer community, rather than maximizing shareholder value. At Gruntwork we still aim for excellence, but we do it while taking care of each other.”
Chris Pham
VP & Head of Sales
“Gruntwork is really an awesome place to work! The team manages to strike a great balance between really difficult and challenging work with being people-first and respecting work-life balance. We're also really fortunate to work with infrastructure experts across the globe who contribute their subject matter expertise across a huge range of infrastructure subjects that allows our small company to cover a lot of ground.”
Zach Goldberg
Chief Technical Officer
“When I joined Gruntwork I immediately felt comfortable voicing my opinion, which is something that often feels like it has to be earned. There's a real culture of empathy and trust here, alongside incredible technical talent. Working here is amazing.”
Lewis Christie
Senior Software Engineer