We are looking for a Kubernetes Solution Engineer on the US East Coast

Giant Swarm is a fast-growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products.

You are the voice of our existing and prospective US customers inside Giant Swarm and the voice of Giant Swarm towards these customers, helping both sides to be successful.

We're a distributed, diverse, and growing team spread across Europe, with a small office in our headquarters in Cologne, Germany. With under 5% of the company working there, all workflows are created to function remotely - but of course, if you want to visit Cologne, you are more than welcome! You will also find someone in 15 other countries though.

While we are remote-first, we appreciate quality time with our co-workers, so we meet in person twice a year to work and have fun together.

Work-life integration

• Flexible working hours, and working from home or anywhere you prefer but please note that your permanent location should be somewhere on the US East Coast.
• Currently, the number of kids from our team members outnumbers the number of employees.
• We don’t only care about the kids “within” the company, but also about all children - for example, we compensate the carbon of all our flights.
• As an international company, we want to create similar standards for everyone, regardless of location. So, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory.

Your Job:

• We have recently won our first US-based client and are planning on expanding this area further.
• Together with our first US based Platform Engineer, you’ll be spearheading our future US team
• You’ll be working closely with our cross-functional teams based in Europe
• In close cooperation with our US customers you’ll understand their architecture and further their understanding of Giant Swarm, helping them to get the most out of our product and the CNCF landscape, master Cloud Native tools like Kubernetes, Prometheus as well as Loki, Helm and others
• Our solution engineers are becoming part of diverse open source communities around tools that our customers need and use, contributing back to those projects where possible. You build and maintain helm charts that might start out as a special project for one customer and end up being a managed service run by all our customers
• You hold trainings and workshops at conferences, for our existing customers, as well as with Giant Swarm’s potential customers. Do note that the role requires minimum travel as most of our interactions as a fully remote company are via video conferencing
• Learn from customer's problems with moving to microservices architectures, get your hands dirty and find out what Cloud Native project's entrails look like. The more successful our customers are with the Cloud Native journey, the more successful we are
• Ultimately, you are also responsible for documentation, helping the product teams implement fixes, prioritizing features and making sure we only need to answer questions once
• First impressions are important! You help create a great onboarding experience for our customers and become the main point of contact for them
• To sum it up: Customer Success is all that matters. Within the solution engineering team, we make sure our customers are happy and taking the right steps going forward, at best you anticipate the problems they might face in the future

Requirements:

• You have experience with more than one programming language, including Go, and a strong architectural background.
• You feel at home in the Kubernetes world, especially the multitude of Open Source tools around Kubernetes and the Container World.
• You can explain complicated things concisely and easily for a diverse audience.
• You have a strong sense in providing an awesome customer service that makes life easier for Developers. Your communication skills (especially written form) are excellent. Very good English skills are a must-have. German skills are a bonus.
• You are open to attend conferences with our team and hold talks in front of customers. You are happy to travel 5-10% per year
• You are based on the US East Coast

Why we think this job is worth applying for (challenge us!)

Impact, Impact, Impact! We are a remote-first organization with a growing team from 15+ European countries. Every new team member changes the team. This is great! People who know things we don’t are highly welcome.

“It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission” (Grace Hopper) - sure, it’s not 100% like this, but we have a strong culture of failure which, is part of our agile mindset. We don’t do things like in the guidebook. You can try things out! Our default to 100% transparency will help you here.

We play a key role in our customers' digital transformation. We have partnered up with Amazon and Microsoft to provide our solution on their cloud platforms - more will follow.

We have been in this ecosystem from the get-go and as part of the CNCF family, we feel at home in the community. As a part of Giant Swarm, you will also join this extended family.

We serve some of Europe's leading organizations and are talking to many more.

WHY Giant Swarm?

We like to give you a glimpse on how working with is like:

Self-organization

Creative work needs freedom and openness. We encourage you to do your work wherever and whenever you want. We expect passion and encourage sustainability. If you need rest, take it. We don't count holidays - but we are also aware that this combined with remote work can also lead to working too much. So we encourage you to take holidays and help you to manage the freedom and flexibility.

Teamwork

We are a growing company with team members distributed all over Europe and plans on expanding to the US. Our ambitious goals are only achievable as a team. Everybody’s input is highly welcome and appreciated. Although sometimes rules and processes are necessary, we try to keep them as lean as possible. Always question the status quo and find new ways of collaboration and teamwork.

Learning

Learning is mandatory and fun at the same time. If you realize you want to expand your knowledge in a specific area, we support you with conferences, books etc.

Basics

We offer fair (transparent and open) salaries with benefits like choosing your own laptop, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory. And you will participate in our stock options program. Currently, our team members have more children than we are employees. So family-friendliness is a must.

We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.

Interested? Questions? Contact Larissa or apply directly.