Posted almost 4 years ago
We're a non-profit organisation on a mission to create modern, independent publishing technology to power the future of online journalism.
This is not a rocket-ship. You won't find any unicorn glitter or exponential curves around here, just a real company with a sustainable business which has been profitable from year 1 and has been growing healthily ever since. Currently our Annual Recurring Revenue is $2,100,000. We're very transparent about our mission and our metrics, you can read all about us.
Ghost is a full stack web application for running independent publications. It’s one of the most popular modern open source projects in the world, and is used in production by tens of thousands of websites and companies.
Chances are you've already visited and read sites which run on Ghost. Our users range from hugely popular bloggers like Jeff Atwood, Troy Hunt and Joel Gascoigne - through to some of the world's largest organisations like Apple, Square, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, CloudFlare, Digital Ocean, Mozilla, Napster, Tinder, OkCupid and many, many more.
Ghost as a business is made up of two primary products:
The platform is targeted at professional/business users, and in turn funds the entire company to build free, open source software for everyone.
As the company grows, we’re looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer to join the team and lead the development of our Ghost(Pro) platform and services. This role reports directly to Ghost’s CTO, Hannah, with plenty of freedom and control to architect a real production system which is already serving over 500million requests a month - with a ton of room for improvement.
All of our infrastructure and systems have gone through several iterations, but have ultimately been built by a small/scrappy team of passionate developers without significant prior sysadmin experience. Our platform these days is pretty solid, but it took us a long time and a lot of trial and error to get here. What we’re looking for now is a confident sysadmin, capable of helping our team taking our infrastructure to the next level.
For this position, we're explicitly looking for someone experienced (5+ years sysadmin experience) and confident in taking on a broad set of responsibilities managing, deploying and maintaining complex projects across several different environments.
Extensive experience in systems management and automation is a must. Experience specifically relating to web hosting at scale, continuous integration, monitoring and performance management is a huge advantage. Previous remote work and startup experience is also very valuable.
Our infrastructure is comprised of about 100 servers across two datacenters, running Ubuntu and managed with Saltstack, sitting behind a fairly deep CDN integration. Most common tech across our instances includes MySQL, Varnish, OpenResty/Nginx, LXC, Gluster, and a whole lot of Node.js.
We deliver these services with CI/CD and support them with VictorOps for on-call & alerts, Sensu for monitoring, TIG stack for metrics and have an increasing reliance on ElasticStack for logs and data. As we grow as a business, data & metrics are becoming core to our ability to succeed.
This role requires someone who is exceptional at clear, frequent communication, especially when identifying and responding to infrastructure failures, as well as…
This role would be well suited to someone already working in an existing ops team at a fast-paced technology (particularly hosting) company. They'd be looking for more responsibility and more control and influence on the systems architecture. There are many of opportunities for growth here as the team expands!
We don't mind what hours you work, but this role requires reasonable working-hours overlap with the rest of the infrastructure team, as well as availability to be on-call on a rotating schedule in the event of downtime. Therefore is role is restricted to UTC +0 to UTC +12 timezones. For this particular role the salary range is between $60k - $100k USD.
We value diversity of all types at Ghost and our team is made up of a kind, thoughtful group of people with a wide range of backgrounds. We have as many people who speak German as we do English and our engineering team contains as many women as it does men. Some of us are single, others are married, while others are parents. We actively try to find people with different perspectives and experiences to the ones we already have.
We’re profitable, we have unlimited runway, and we have very healthy revenue growth. There's no investor pressure, time limit, or need to hire as many people as fast as possible to fill a fancy office. We want to keep the team small, automate as much as possible with robots, build great software, and enjoy our work. Those are the things we optimise for. If that sounds like a good fit for you, then we’d encourage you to get in touch.
All jobs at Ghost start with an application form, progressing to 1-2 short interviews, and finally a (paid) trial project assignment.
Rather than trying to guess if we'll work well together based on lengthy arbitrary interview questions or challenges - instead we invite promising candidates to work on a real life trial project with us and pay them for their time. Trial projects are typically 20-30 hours of work, and give us an opportunity to get to know each other prior to pursuing a full time offer. It’s also a chance for candidates to get to know the Ghost team and make sure that it’s a good fit for them.
The button below will take you to the application form for this position where you can tell us a little more about yourself. Or, if you know someone who would be a great fit - maybe send them a link to this page?
Please note: For this particular position at Ghost we are explicitly looking for someone who is based within the UTC +0 to UTC +12 timezones.
We generally get 300-400 applications for each open position, keeping that in mind when sending us your details can be very helpful. Women and minorities of any description are especially encouraged to apply!