Are you an expert in the inner workings of the FTP protocol or SFTP protocol? Would building a server that achieves perfect compatibility with the RFC while still managing to support buggy clients make you smile?

If so, we’d like you to learn about Files.com!

Files.com is one of the largest providers of commercial FTP and SFTP server hosting in the world. Our service was originally launched as BrickFTP, and even though we’ve grown beyond FTP in our service offerings, we have thousands of businesses that rely on our services 24/7 for reliable FTP and SFTP server hosting.

Our FTP and SFTP server code is primarily written in Java and leverages open source code from the Apache foundation (that we have considerably extended).

We’re looking for a rare unicorn who knows FTP and/or SFTP at a protocol level and knows Java to help us modernize our FTP and SFTP server code and implement many new exciting features.

Read on to learn more!

About Files.com

Files.com is the new name for BrickFTP, a cloud storage service that has existed since 2009 and has over 1,700 paying business customers.

Our company consists of 20 (and growing to 30 by the end of 2019) USA-based remote employees who work from home.

Our products and services are used by over 2,000 enterprises and SMBs, including Target, Canonical, UPS, Leica, DirecTV, GoPro, Marriott, and more.

We’re Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Growing

Our success comes from building a great service that solves problems for our customers, and our growth comes from expanding and improving our products as quickly as we can.

We believe that great products can only be built by great people. So we’re on a quest to find the smartest, most creative, and most motivated people, and create an environment in which they thrive.

We Are A Remote Company

You will work from home and have some flexibility to choose your working hours, allowing you to make time for family, recreation, vacations, or anything that is important to you.

You’ll take off 11 company-wide holidays per year as well as 20 days of PTO for vacations. You’ll have the time to take longer vacations and have fun.

Every quarter, you’ll travel to an in-person meeting with the entire team to meet and work together face to face. These meetings are in cities that are fun to visit. In the last few years, we’ve been to Austin, Orlando, New Orleans, San Diego, Las Vegas, and New York City.

We think that these in-person meetings are vital to the success of a remote team.

About the Role

As an FTP or SFTP server developer at Files.com, you’ll take ownership of our FTP and SFTP server code, helping us keep it modern, fast, and maintainable, while implementing exciting new features.

These codebases are currently written in Java, and we want applicants to be comfortable in Java, but we are also interested in rewriting these in more modern languages such as Go or Elixir, especially if we can leverage existing FTP or SFTP libraries.

In this role, you’ll work on the following things and more:

• Keeping our SSH and TLS cryptography up to date, including integrating new ciphers and curating the list of approved ciphers for maximum security.

• Ensuring that our FTP and SFTP server products are maximally compatible with the wide range of client software in the wild (even the buggy software).

• Optimizing our FTP and SFTP servers for speed and throughput so our customers get the fastest server experience possible.

• Integrating new features such as client-side encryption.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years of directly applicable experience.

• Deep understanding of the FTP and/or SFTP protocols at the protocol level. Having written an FTP or SFTP client or server in the past would be a strong indicator of this.

• Strong Computer Science background and understanding of algorithms and data structures.

• History developing and supporting actual applications that have seen production usage with a large userbase.

• Complete understanding of how to write secure code and an awareness of common web application security vulnerabilities.

• Solid experience with Java, ideally the new features in Java 8 and Java 10.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Participation in open source projects, including ideally being the maintainer for a package that sees large usage in the community.

Our Core Beliefs

Here are just some of our Core Beliefs:

• We believe that the best Engineers tend to be polyglots with a wide variety of programming language experience. We don’t hire for specific programming language skills, but rather look for engineers who are fluent in several programming languages. We want our staff to be adaptable and ready to evolve to what’s next.

• We believe in using the right tool for the job. Our core applications are built in Ruby, JavaScript, Java, C++, and PHP. We use Rails, React, Chef, Qt, Jenkins, Github, Honeybadger, CircleCI, Maven, AWS, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, Haml, Sass, and many other exciting open source systems. We don’t want to get stuck in the trap of using a language or a tool just because “that’s how it’s done around here.”

• We believe that open-source only works if companies give back. If you work on any open-source projects during the course of your work at Files.com, you are encouraged to submit your improvements as a pull request back to the upstream project. And if you build something from scratch while working here that’s generic and not related to our core products, we want you to release that on GitHub too. We’ll also pay your travel costs to any conference where you can get a speaking gig.

• We believe in building products that we actually use ourselves. We are our own toughest critics and we put all of our products through their paces every day.

Salary, Pay, and Benefits

• Files.com offers industry-leading salaries based on experience combined with unparalleled flexibility and other benefits to secure top talent.

• You’ll take off 11 company-wide holidays per year as well as 20 days of PTO for vacations. Go have fun. Don’t work all the time.

• We will provide you a $2,500 signing bonus to purchase a new computer, desk, or anything else that would help build or refresh your home office.

• We’ll update your salary annually based on your performance, as reviewed by your peers.

• We fully pay base plan health insurance premiums (exact plan details depend on your state of residence), and we’ll pick up the tab for 75% of your spouse or dependents if they wish to join your chosen plan. We want your family to be healthy.